TERMS STARTING WITH
lectured ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Lecture
lecture ::: n. --> The act of reading; as, the lecture of Holy Scripture.
A discourse on any subject; especially, a formal or methodical discourse, intended for instruction; sometimes, a familiar discourse, in contrast with a sermon.
A reprimand or formal reproof from one having authority.
A rehearsal of a lesson. ::: v. t.
lecturer ::: n. --> One who lectures; an assistant preacher.
lectureship ::: n. --> The office of a lecturer.
TERMS ANYWHERE
Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta. (1870-1949). Thai monk who revitalized the Thai forest-monk tradition (Thai PHRA PA), and the subject of a celebrated Thai hagiography by Ajahn MahA Boowa NAnasampanno (b. 1913). Born in 1870, in Ban Khambong village in the province of Ubon Ratchathani, Mun was ordained in 1893 at Wat Liab and began studying insight practice (VIPAsYANA) under the guidance of Ajahn Sao Kantasīla (1861-1941). Through developing the meditation on foulness (AsUBHABHAVANA), he eventually had an experience of calmness (sAMATHA), and in order to enhance his practice, he embarked on the life of asceticism (P. DHUTAnGA) as a forest dweller (P. ARANNAVASI) in northeast Thailand and southern Laos. After every rains' retreat (VARsA) was over, he would travel into the forests, staying just close enough to a few small villages in order to perform his alms round (PIndAPATA) each morning. According to the hagiography, after first experiencing the fruition of the state of the nonreturner (ANAGAMIN), he eventually achieved the stage of a worthy one (ARHAT) in Chiang Mai, an experience that he said shook the entire universe and brought a roar of accolades from the heavenly hosts. Ajahn Mun became a widely known and respected meditator and teacher, who was invited to dwell in monasteries throughout much of Thailand. The hagiography compiled by Ajahn MahA Boowa is filled with exuberantly told tales of his meditative visions, prophetic dreams, lectures and instructions, and encounters with other eminent monks, laypeople, and even with deceased arhats and divinities (DEVA) such as sAKRA with his 100,000 strong retinue. Ajahn Mun's many prominent disciples helped revive the Thai forest-monk tradition, especially in the northeast, and defined its austere practices (Thai, THUDONG; P. DHUTAnGA) in their contemporary context.
Also rationality principle. ::: A principle coined by Karl R. Popper in his Harvard Lecture of 1963, and published in his book Myth of Framework.[251] It is related to what he called the 'logic of the situation' in an Economica article of 1944/1945, published later in his book The Poverty of Historicism.[252] According to Popper's rationality principle, agents act in the most adequate way according to the objective situation. It is an idealized conception of human behavior which he used to drive his model of situational analysis.
Annen. (安然) (841-889?). Japanese TENDAI (C. TIANTAI) monk considered to be the founder of Japanese Tendai esoterism and thus also known as Himitsu daishi. Annen studied under ENNIN and initiated a reform of the Japanese Tendai tradition by incorporating new teachings from China called MIKKYo, or esoteric Buddhism. He received the bodhisattva precepts at ENRYAKUJI on Mt. Hiei (HIEIZAN) in 859 and by 884 had become the main dharma lecturer at Gangyoji. He subsequently was the founder of a monastery called Godaiin and is therefore often known to the tradition as "master Godaiin" (Godaiin daitoku or Godaiin ajari). Over one hundred works are attributed to Annen on both the exoteric and esoteric teachings of Tendai as well as on Sanskrit SIDDHAM orthography; dozens are extant, including texts that are considered primary textbooks of the Japanese Tendai tradition, such as his Hakke hiroku, Kyojijo, and Shittanzo. Annen is especially important for having examined comprehensively the relationship between precepts associated with the esoteric tradition and the Buddhist monastic precepts, including the bodhisattva precepts (BODHISATTVAsĪLA); his ultimate conclusion is that all precepts ultimately derive from specific sets of esoteric precepts.
Aristotelianism: The philosophy of Aristotle, (384-322 B.C.). Aristotle was born in the Greek colony of Stagira, in Macedon, the son of Nicomachus, the physician of King Amyntas of Macedon. In his eighteenth year Aristotle became a pupil of Plato at Athens and remained for nearly twenty years a member of the Academy. After the death of Plato he resided for some time at Atarneus, in the Troad, and at Mitylene, on the island of Lesbos, with friends of the Academy; then for several years he acted as tutor to the young Alexander of Macedon. In 335 he returned to Athens, where he spent the following twelve years as head of a school which he set up in the Lyceum. The school also came to be known as the Peripatetic, and its members Peripatetics, probably because of the peripatos, or covered walk, in which Aristotle lectured. As a result of the outburst of anti-Macedonian feeling at Athens in 323 after the death of Alexander, Aristotle retired to Chalcis, m Euboea, where he died a year later.
Asukadera. (飛鳥寺) In Japanese, "Asuka Temple"; also known as Hokoji ("Monastery of the Flourishing Dharma"), the Asukadera was built during the ASUKA period on a site known as the Amakashi no Oka by the Asuka River near Nara, Japan. Shortly after the death of Emperor Yomei in 587, the powerful vassals Mononobe no Moriya (d. 587), who represented the indigenous ritual specialists, and Soga no Umako (551?-626), a supporter of Buddhism who came from the Korean peninsula, found themselves caught in battle over imperial succession. In celebration of the Soga clan's victory over the Mononobe and the death of Moriya, the Soga commenced the construction of the first complete monastic compound in Japan, which they named Hokoji in 588. Hokoji was completed nine years later in 596 and for more than a century served as the central monastic complex of the Yamato court. The large monastic compound contained a central hall or KONDo and a central pagoda flanked by two other halls. A large lecture hall flanked by a belfry and SuTRA repository was located behind the main monastic complex. According to the NIHON SHOKI ("Historical Records of Japan"), Empress Suiko commissioned two sixteen-feet gilt-bronze icons of the Buddha to be made by Tori Busshi for installment in Hokoji. When the capital was moved from Fujiwarakyo to Heijokyo (modern-day Nara) in 710, the major monasteries including Hokoji were moved as well. Hokoji, otherwise known as Asukadera, was subsequently renamed Gangoji.
back door "security" (Or "{trap door}", "{wormhole}"). A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some {operating systems}, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. See also {iron box}, {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The infamous {RTM} worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the {BSD} Unix "sendmail(8)" {utility}. {Ken Thompson}'s 1983 Turing Award lecture to the {ACM} revealed the existence of a back door in early {Unix} versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognise when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as ["Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763]. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-25)
back door ::: (security) (Or trap door, wormhole). A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. See also iron box, cracker, worm, logic bomb.Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The infamous RTM worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the BSD Unix sendmail(8) utility.Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as [Reflections on Trusting Trust, Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763].[Jargon File] (1995-04-25)
Beal, Samuel. (1825-1889). British translator of Chinese Buddhist works. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he worked as a chaplain in the British navy and rector of various Anglican parishes, including Wark and Northumberland. In 1877, Beal was appointed as lecturer, and later professor, of Chinese at University College, London, where he specialized in Chinese Buddhist materials. Beal is perhaps best known for his translations of the travelogues of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India, including FAXIAN (c. 399/337-422), Song Yun (c. 516-523), and XUANZANG (600/602-664). Especially influential was his translation of Xuanzang's travelogue DA TANG XIYU JI, which he rendered as Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World (two volumes, 1884). Beal's anthology of Chinese Buddhist texts, A Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese (1872), includes translations of a wide range of important Buddhist texts. Beal also compiled one of the first Western-language catalogues of the Chinese Buddhist canon. Other books of his include The Romantic Legend of sAkya Buddha (1876) and Texts from the Buddhist Canon, commonly known as Dhammapada (1878).
belectured ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Belecture
belecture ::: v. t. --> To vex with lectures; to lecture frequently.
belecturing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Belecture
(b) In epistemology and psychology, the term is applied to knowledge, e.g. memory, which lies dormant in the mind but is capable of becoming actual and explicit (see W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, xviii, cited by J. M. Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. I, p. 628). Latency in this restricted sense, designates phenomena now embraced by the term subconscious. See Subconscious. -- L.W.
lectured ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Lecture
lecture ::: n. --> The act of reading; as, the lecture of Holy Scripture.
A discourse on any subject; especially, a formal or methodical discourse, intended for instruction; sometimes, a familiar discourse, in contrast with a sermon.
A reprimand or formal reproof from one having authority.
A rehearsal of a lesson. ::: v. t.
lecturer ::: n. --> One who lectures; an assistant preacher.
lectureship ::: n. --> The office of a lecturer.
But while Peirce thought of pragmatism as akin to the mathematical method, James' motivation and interest was largely moral and religious. Thus in his Will to Believe (New World, 1896) he argues, in line with Pascal's wager, that "we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will," i.e. if it is not resolvable intellectually. Speaking of religious scepticism, he says. "We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical . . . because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively choose to disbelieve". The position of the religious skeptic is: ''Better risk loss of truth than chance of error, . . ." Later, in 1907 in the Lowell Lectures he stated that "on pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true", and took a position between absolutism and materialism which he called "pragmatistic or melioristic" theism. In the same lectures he announces that " 'the true', to put it briefly, is only the expedient in the way of thinking, . . ." James also identifies truth with verifiability, thus anticipating both the experimentalism of Dewey and the operationalism of Bridgman and the logical positivists.
Cambridge School: A term loosely applied to English philosophers who have been influenced by the teachings of Professor G. E. Moore (mainly in unpublished lectures delivered at the Cambridge University, 1911-1939). In earlier years Moore stressed the need to accept the judgments of "common sense" on such matters as the existence of other persons, of an "external world", etc. The business of the analytical philosopher was not to criticise such judgments but to display the structure of the facts to which they referred. (Cf. "A defense of common-sense in philosophy," Contemporary British Philosophy, 2 (1925) -- Moore's only discussion of the method.) Such analysis would be directional, terminating in basic or atomic facts, all of whose constituents might be known by acquaintance. The examples discussed were taken largely from the field of epistemology, turning often about the problem of the relation of material objects to sense-data, and of indirect to direct knowledge. In this earlier period problems were often suggested by Russell's discussion of descriptions and logical constructions. The inconclusiveness of such specific discussions and an increasingly critical awareness of the functions of language in philosophical analysis has in later years tended to favor more flexible interpretations of the nature of analysis. (Cf. M. Black, "Relations Between Logical Positivism and the Cambridge School of Analysis", Journal of Unified Science (Erkenntnis), 8, 24-35 for a bibliography and list of philosophers who have been most influenced by emphasis on directional analysis.) -- M.B.
Changuan cejin. (J. Zenkan sakushin; K. Son'gwan ch'aekchin 禪關策進). In Chinese, "Spurring Advancement through the Chan Barrier"; composed by the CHAN master YUNQI ZHUHONG in 1600. The text has long been used in Chan monasteries as a primer in meditation. From various Chan lineage histories (CHUANDENG LU) and recorded sayings (YULU), Yunqi compiled over a hundred anecdotes and legends about Chan masters that cogently demonstrated the value of diligence and intense practice. The Changuan cejin consists of two general collections. The first collection itself is further divided into two sections, entitled "Zhuzu fayu jieyao" ("Essential Selections of Dharma Talks by Various Masters") and "Zhuzu kugong jielüe" ("Brief Selections of the Painful Effort of Various Masters"). The first section consists largely of public lectures delivered by famous Chan masters, with Yunqi's own evaluation and notes appended at the end of each lecture. Similarly, the second section consists largely of stories of courageous efforts in practice made by various monks of the past, again with Yunqi's evaluations appended at the end of each story. The second collection, entitled "Zhujing yinzheng jielüe" ("Brief Selections of Verified Passages from Various Scriptures"), also consists of short passages quoted from various scriptures, with Yunqi's evaluation appended at the end of each passage.
Charles Babbage "person" The British inventor known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his {Analytical Engine}. His previous {Difference Engine} was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables. Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he published a table of {logarithms} from 1 to 108000. In 1828 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London. Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking. [Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994]. Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of {abstraction}, fell into a trap familiar to {toolsmiths} since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord Moulton: "One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my {Analytical Machine}, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.'" "After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart." "When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to any useful purpose." [Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial volume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage "Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994), p. 34]. Compare: {uninteresting}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}. (1996-02-22)
Chogye Chin'gak kuksa orok. (曹溪眞覺國師語録). In Korean, "Recorded Sayings of the National Master Chin'gak of Mt. Chogye"; a collection of the sayings of the Korean SoN master CHIN'GAK HYESIM. As the first and oldest recorded saying (YULU) collection in Korea, the Chogye Chin'gak kuksa orok has served as an important source for studying the early history of kongan studies in that region (see GONG'AN). The oldest extant edition of the text dates to 1526. The collection consists largely of Hyesim's various public lectures (e.g., SHANGTANG, shizhong, and FAYU), private lessons (DUIJIs, xiaocan, and AGYO), and letters to his students. Many of his lectures are concerned with the famous kongan attributed to ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN, wherein Zhaozhou offers the reply "wu" ("no") to the question, "Does a dog have buddha nature, or not?" (see GOUZI WU FOXING).
ch'ongnim. (叢林). In Korean, lit., "dense grove"; a large, ecumenical monastery. In Korea, the term ch'ongnim is used in the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG to refer to a handful of major monasteries that are able to provide training in the full range of practices that exemplify the major strands of the Korean Buddhist tradition, including SoN meditation, KYO (and especially Hwaom, C. HUAYAN) doctrine, PURE LAND recitation of the buddha AMITABHA's name (K. yombul; see NIANFO), and VINAYA (monastic discipline) observance. While most monasteries are primarily devoted to one or another of these types of training, a ch'ongnim serves as a center where all can be practiced. These monasteries thus typically are larger comprehensive training centers, with a meditation hall (sonbang) and a monks' seminary or lecture hall (kangwon) on the campus; additionally, their spiritual head is called a pangjang (C. FANGJANG) rather than the usual chosil ("occupant of the patriarchs' room"). A monastery designated as a ch'ongnim receives a second name, most of which designate the mountain at which they are located. The five current Korean ch'ongnims are HAEINSA (also known as the Haein Ch'ongnim), SONGGWANGSA (Chogye Ch'ongnim), T'ONGDOSA (Yongch'uk Ch'ongnim), SUDoKSA (Toksung Ch'ongnim), and PAEGYANGSA (Kobul Ch'ongnim). See also CONGLIN.
Chuanxin fayao. (J. Denshinhoyo; K. Chonsim pobyo 傳心法要). In Chinese, "Essential Teachings on the Transmission of the Mind"; by the CHAN master HUANGBO XIYUN, also known as the Huangboshan Duanji chanshi chuanxin fayao. Huangbo's prominent lay disciple Pei Xiu's (787?-860) preface to the text was prepared in 857. Pei Xiu, the powerful Tang-dynasty minister of state, is said to have recorded the lectures delivered by Huangbo at the monasteries of Longxingsi and Kaiyuansi, and edited his notes together as the Chuanxin fayao and WANLING LU. The two texts seem to have circulated together until the eleventh century. The central tenet of the Chuanxin fayao is the teaching of the "one mind" (YIXIN). Since everything, including buddhas and sentient beings, are all considered to be aspects of the one mind, Huangbo's use of this term underscores the fundamental unity of all things. Huangbo also likens this mind to space, a common metaphor for emptiness (suNYATA). Chan practice entails bringing an end to the discriminative process of thought, so that this one mind will be made manifest. Since all beings are inherently endowed with this one mind, which is complete in and of itself, there is no need to develop a series of practices, such as the six PARAMITAs, or to amass stores of merit (PUnYA), in order to perfect that one mind. Simply awakening to that one mind will itself be sufficient to transform an ignorant sentient being into an enlightened buddha.
Chu Hsi: (Chu Hui-an, Chu Yiian-hui, Chu Chung-hui, 1130-1200) Early distinguished himself as a patriot-scholar, having repeatedly petitioned the emperor to practice the principles of "investigation of things" and "extension of knowledge" and not to make peace with the invading enemy. But he preferred a life of peace and poverty, accepted a number of government appointments with a great deal of reluctance. His lectures at the White Deer Grotto attracted all prominent scholars of the time. The works of this leader of Neo-Confucianism (li hsueh) include the Chu Tzu Ch'uan-shu ("Complete Works," really Selected Works, partial English transl. by J. P. Bruce: The Philosophy of Human Nature by Chu Hsi) of 66 Chinese chuans in 25 volumes and the Yu Lei (Sayings Arranged by Topics) of 140 chuans in 40 volumes. -- W.T.C.
Consciousness: (Lat. conscire, to know, to be cognizant of) A designation applied to conscious mind as opposed to a supposedly unconscious or subconscious mind (See Subconscious Mind; Unconscious Mind), and to the whole domain of the physical and non-mental. Consciousness is generally considered an indefinable term or rather a term definable only by direct introspective appeal to conscious experiences. The indefinability of consciousness is expressed by Sir William Hamilton: "Consciousness cannot be defined: we may be ourselves fully aware what consciousness is, but we cannot without confusion convey to others a definition of what we ourselves clearly apprehend. The reason is plain: consciousness lies at the root of all knowledge." (Lectures on Metaphysics, I, 191.) Ladd's frequently quoted definition of consciousness succeeds only in indicating the circumstances under which it is directly observable: "Whatever we are when we are awake, as contrasted with what we are when we sink into a profound and dreamless sleep, that is to be conscious."
core dump ::: [Common Iron Age jargon, preserved by Unix] 1. A copy of the contents of core, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error.2. A complete account of a human's knowledge on some subject (also brain dump), especially in a lecture or answer to an exam question. Short, concise answers are better than core dumps (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia).[Jargon File]
core dump "programming, operating system, jargon" Common {Iron Age} jargon, preserved by {Unix} for a {memory dump}. The term is also used for a complete account of a human's knowledge on some subject (also {brain dump}), especially in a lecture or answer to an exam question. [{Jargon File}] (2007-05-09)
Cousin, Victor: (1792-1867) Was among those principally responsible for producing the shift in French philosophy away from sensationalism in the direction of "spiritualism"; in his own thinking, Cousin was first influenced by Locke and Condillac, and later turned to idealism under the influence of Maine de Biran and Schelling. His most characteristic philosophical insights are contained in Fragments Philosophiques (1826), in which he advocated as the basis of metaphysics a careful observation and analysis of the facts of the conscious life. He lectured at the Sorbonne from 1815 until 1820 when he was suspended for political reasons, but he was reinstated in 1827 and continued to lecture there until 1832. He exercised a great influence on his philosophical contemporaries and founded the spiritualistic or eclectic school in French Philosophy. The members of his school devoted themselves largely to historical studies for which Cousin had provided the example in his Introduction a l'Histoire General de la Philosophie, 7th ed. 1872. -- L.W.
curried function ::: (mathematics, programming) A function of N arguments that is considered as a function of one argument which returns another function of N-1 arguments. E.g. in Haskell we can define: average :: Int -> (Int -> Int) application can be represented using a lambda abstraction: \ x -> average(4,x) Currying is necessary if full laziness is to be applied to functional sub-expressions.It was named after the logician Haskell Curry but the 19th-century logician, Gottlob Frege was the first to propose it and it was first referred to in [Uber die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik, M. Schoenfinkel, Mathematische Annalen. Vol 92 (1924)].David Turner said he got the term from Christopher Strachey who invented the term currying and used it in his lecture notes on programming languages written circa 1967. Strachey also remarked that it ought really to be called Schoenfinkeling.Stefan Kahrs reported hearing somebody in Germany trying to introduce schonen for currying and finkeln for uncurrying. The verb schonen means to beautify; finkeln isn't a German word, but it suggests to fiddle.[Some philosophical aspects of combinatory logic, H. B. Curry, The Kleene Symposium, Eds. J. Barwise, J. Keisler, K. Kunen, North Holland, 1980, pp. 85-101](2002-07-24)
curried function "mathematics, programming" A {function} of N {arguments} that is considered as a function of one argument which returns another function of N-1 arguments. E.g. in {Haskell} we can define: average :: Int -" (Int -" Int) (The parentheses are optional). A {partial application} of average, to one Int, e.g. (average 4), returns a function of type (Int -" Int) which averages its argument with 4. In uncurried languages a function must always be applied to all its arguments but a {partial application} can be represented using a {lambda abstraction}: \ x -" average(4,x) Currying is necessary if {full laziness} is to be applied to functional sub-expressions. It was named after the logician {Haskell Curry} but the 19th-century logician, {Gottlob Frege} was the first to propose it and it was first referred to in ["Uber die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik", M. Schoenfinkel, Mathematische Annalen. Vol 92 (1924)]. {David Turner} said he got the term from {Christopher Strachey} who invented the term "currying" and used it in his lecture notes on programming languages written circa 1967. Strachey also remarked that it ought really to be called "Schoenfinkeling". Stefan Kahrs "smk@dcs.ed.ac.uk" reported hearing somebody in Germany trying to introduce "scho"nen" for currying and "finkeln" for "uncurrying". The verb "scho"nen" means "to beautify"; "finkeln" isn't a German word, but it suggests "to fiddle". ["Some philosophical aspects of combinatory logic", H. B. Curry, The Kleene Symposium, Eds. J. Barwise, J. Keisler, K. Kunen, North Holland, 1980, pp. 85-101] (2002-07-24)
Dahong Bao'en. (J. Daiko Hoon; K. Taehong Poŭn 大洪報恩) (1058-1111). Chinese CHAN master of the CAODONG lineage. Dahong was a native of Liyang in present-day Henan province. Raised in a traditional family, he became an official at an early age, but later abandoned the position, with the court's permission, in order to ordain as a monk. He studied under the Chan master TOUZI YIQING and became his disciple. Dahong was later invited by the prime minister to lecture at the famed monastery of SHAOLINSI. In response to still another request, he moved to Mt. Dahong in Suizhou prefecture (present-day Hubei province), whence he acquired his toponym, and became the first Chan monk to convert a VINAYA monastery into a Chan center, which he named Chongning Baoshou Chanyuan. Dahong also became close friends with the powerful and outspoken statesman ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1122). Dahong is known to have composed several texts including a history of the Caodong tradition, Caodong zongpai lu, and manuals for conferring the precepts, such as the Shou puti xinjie wen and Luofa shoujie yiwen; none of these texts are extant.
database 1. "database" One or more large structured sets of persistent data, usually associated with software to update and {query} the data. A simple database might be a single file containing many {records}, each of which contains the same set of {fields} where each field is a certain fixed width. A database is one component of a {database management system}. See also {ANSI/SPARC Architecture}, {atomic}, {blob}, {data definition language}, {deductive database}, {distributed database}, {fourth generation language}, {functional database}, {object-oriented database}, {relational database}. {Carol E. Brown's tutorial (http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aies/www.bus.orst.edu/faculty/brownc/lectures/db_tutor/db_tutor.htm)}. 2. "hypertext" A collection of {nodes} managed and stored in one place and all accessible via the same {server}. {Links} outside this are "external", and those inside are "internal". On the {World-Wide Web} this is called a {website}. 3. All the facts and rules comprising a {logic programming} program. (2005-11-17)
Dayang Jingxuan. (J. Taiyo Kyogen; K. Taeyang Kyonghyon 大陽警玄) (942-1027). Chinese CHAN master in the CAODONG ZONG. A native of Jiangxia in present-day Hubei province, Dayang was ordained at the monastery of Chongxiaosi in Jinleng by his uncle, who had also become a monk. After traveling throughout China, Dayang visited the Chan master Liangshan Yuanguan (d.u.) in Dingzhou prefecture (present-day Sichuan province) and became his disciple. Later, he became a student of the Caodong monk Huijian (d.u.) and took over his lecture seat on Mt. Dayang, which became his toponym. Before his death, Dayang entrusted his portrait (DINGXIANG), leather shoes, and patched robe to his friend Fushan Fayuan (991-1067) of the LINJI ZONG in hopes of continuing his Caodong lineage and the incumbent annual memorial services to the patriarchs in his line. Fushan in turn transferred these items to his student TOZI YIQING, who embraced Dayang's line and became a Caodong lineage holder. Dayang was bestowed the posthumous title Great Master Ming'an ("Illuminating Peace"). His teachings are recorded in the Dayang Ming'an dashi shibaban miaoyu.
dazangjing. (J. daizokyo; K. taejanggyong 大藏經). In Chinese, "scriptures of the great repository"; the term the Chinese settled upon to describe their Buddhist canon, supplanting the Indian term TRIPItAKA ("three baskets"). The myriad texts of different Indian and Central Asian Buddhist schools were transmitted to China over a millennium, from about the second through the twelfth centuries CE, where they were translated with alacrity into Chinese. Chinese Buddhists texts therefore came to include not only the tripitakas of several independent schools of Indian Buddhism, but also different recensions of various MAHĀYĀNA scriptures and Buddhist TANTRAs, sometimes in multiple translations. As the East Asian tradition developed its own scholarly traditions, indigenous writings by native East Asian authors, composed in literary Chinese, also came to be included in the canon. These materials included scriptural commentaries, doctrinal treatises, biographical and hagiographical collections, edited transcriptions of oral lectures, Chinese-Sanskrit dictionaries, scriptural catalogues (JINGLU), and so on. Because the scope of the Buddhist canon in China was therefore substantially broader than the traditional tripartite structure of an Indian tripitaka, the Chinese coined alternative terms to refer to their collection of Buddhist materials, including "all the books" (yiqie jing), until eventually settling on the term dazangjing. The term dazangjing seems to derive from a Northern Song-dynasty term for an officially commissioned "great library" (dazang) that was intended to serve as a repository for "books" (jing) sanctioned by the court. Buddhist monasteries were the first places outside the imperial palaces that such officially sanctioned libraries were established. These collections of the official canonical books of Chinese Buddhism were arranged not by the VINAYA, SuTRA, ABHIDHARMA, and sĀSTRA categories of India, but in shelf lists that were more beholden to the categorizations used in court libraries. The earliest complete Buddhist canons in China date from the fifth century; by the eighth century, these manuscript collections included over one thousand individual texts in more than five thousand rolls. By the tenth century, woodblock printing techniques had become sophisticated enough that complete printed Buddhist canons began to be published, first during the Song dynasty, and thence throughout East Asia. The second xylographic canon of the Korean Koryo dynasty, the KORYo TAEJANGGYoNG, was especially renowned for its scholarly accuracy; it included some 1,514 texts, in 6,815 rolls, carved on 81,258 individual woodblocks, which are still housed today in the scriptural repository at the monastery of HAEINSA. The second Koryo canon is arranged with pride of place given to texts from the Mahāyāna tradition:
Dimensions of Consciousness: (Lat. dimensus, pp. of dimentire, to measure off) Pervasive and mutually irreducible features of conscious processes such as quality, intensity, extent, duration and intentionality. (Cf. E. B. Titchencr, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention, Lect. IV; E. G. Boring, The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness, Ch. 3.) -- L.W.
Dohan. (道範) (1179-1252). A Kamakura-period SHINGON scholar-monk from KoYASAN, who wrote extensively on the works of KuKAI and KAKUBAN. He is well known for his esoteric writings on the PURE LAND, especially the Himitsu nenbutsusho ("Compendium on the Secret Contemplation of Buddha"). Dohan was ordained at the age of fourteen under Myonin (1148-1229) at Shochiin, and he later studied under KAKUKAI at Keoin. In 1237, Dohan was appointed head administrator of Shochiin. In 1243, a violent dispute erupted between Kongobuji and Daidenboin, which resulted in the exile of Dohan and around thirty other Koyasan elders. Dohan's travel diary, Nankai ruroki ("Record of Wandering by the Southern Sea"), records his time in exile on the island of Shikoku, traveling to many sites associated with Kukai. One of his dharma lectures from his time in exile survives as Dohan goshosoku ("Dohan's Letter"), a short discussion of AJIKAN, or contemplation of the letter "a." In 1249, Dohan was pardoned by imperial decree and permitted to return to Koyasan, where he passed away in 1252.
Dorzhiev, Agvan. (T. Ngag dbang rdo rje) (1854-1938). Influential Mongol-Russian monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition; born in the Siberian region of Buryatia to a semi-nomadic Buddhist family. As a child, Dorzhiev was introduced to Buddhism at the monastery at Atsagat, receiving his first tantric empowerment (ABHIsEKA) at the age of thirteen. He continued his education in Urga after his father died in 1868, at which time there were thirteen thousand monks in the city. For a time he was married to a woman named Kholintsog and worked in the local government. In 1873, he began his first journey to LHA SA and spent a few months in eastern China. Because of his linguistic and academic prowess, he was sent to 'BRAS SPUNGS monastery, where he became a scholar at Sgo mang (Gomang) College. In 1880, he settled in Lha sa, and rapidly completed his DGE BSHES degree. By 1888, he was teaching logic, debate, and language at 'Bras spungs. At this time, the thirteenth DALAI LAMA was twelve or thirteen years old, and Dorzhiev became one of his religious teachers and political advisors. Dorzhiev displayed great ability in political diplomacy and served as the only emissary between Russia and Tibet for many years. He feared that British influence in Tibet could be detrimental to the future of the country, and advised the Dalai Lama to initiate relations between Lha sa and St. Petersburg as a counter. In 1898, Prince Ukhtomsky summoned him to St. Petersburg, where he met with Tsar Nicholas II. From there, he traveled to Paris, where he lectured on Buddhism at the Musée Guimet. He then went to Kalmykia and Buryatia before returning to Lha sa. Dorzhiev sought to improve the quality of Buddhist practice in Russia, specifically in Buryatia and Kalmykia, where he opened monasteries, initiated monks, and opened a school for Tibetan Buddhist doctors. In 1915 he opened a temple and monastery in St. Petersburg, the first in the West. Dorzhiev was arrested at the onset of the "Red Terror" of 1918, but was soon released. Buddhism remained comparatively inviolable over the next decade, although other Russian religions suffered. Dorzhiev wrote his memoirs in Tibetan around 1924. In 1922, an "All-Buryat Buddhist Congress" was held, followed by a 1927 "Congress of Soviet Buddhists" in Moscow. Russian Buddhism entered a bleak period after the death of Lenin in 1924; in 1930, an antireligion campaign began in Buryatia, during which the aged Dorzhiev was placed under house arrest. He wrote his will in 1937, at which time he left house arrest in Leningrad and traveled to Ulan Udé, Buryatia. In Ulan Udé, he was arrested and interrogated before being sent to the prison hospital, where he died in January of 1938.
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer "computer" (ENIAC) The first electronic {digital computer} and an ancestor of most computers in use today. ENIAC was developed by Dr. {John Mauchly} and {J. Presper Eckert} during World War II at the Moore School of the {University of Pennsylvania}. In 1940 Dr. {John Vincent Atanasoff} attended a lecture by Mauchly and subsequently agreed to show him his binary calculator, the {Atanasoff-Berry Computer} (ABC), which was partially built between 1937-1942. Mauchly used ideas from the ABC in the design of ENIAC, which was started in June 1943 and released publicly in 1946. ENIAC was not the first digital computer, {Konrad Zuse}'s {Z3} was released in 1941. Though, like the ABC, the Z3 was {electromechanical} rather than electronic, it was freely programmable via paper tape whereas ENIAC was only programmable by manual rewiring or switches. Z3 used binary representation like modern computers whereas ENIAC used decimal like mechanical calculators. ENIAC was underwritten and its development overseen by Lieutenant Herman Goldstine of the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL). While the prime motivation for constructing the machine was to automate the wartime production of firing and bombing tables, the very first program run on ENIAC was a highly classified computation for Los Alamos. Later applications included weather prediction, cosmic ray studies, wind tunnel design, petroleum exploration, and optics. ENIAC had 20 {registers} made entirely from {vacuum tubes}. It had no other no memory as we currently understand it. The machine performed an addition in 200 {microseconds}, a multiplication in about three {milliseconds}, and a division in about 30 milliseconds. {John von Neumann}, a world-renowned mathematician serving on the BRL Scientific Advisory Committee, soon joined the developers of ENIAC and made some critical contributions. While Mauchly, Eckert and the Penn team continued on the technological problems, he, Goldstine, and others took up the logical problems. In 1947, while working on the design for the successor machine, EDVAC, von Neumann realized that ENIAC's lack of a central control unit could be overcome to obtain a rudimentary stored program computer (see the Clippinger reference below). Modifications were undertaken that eventually led to an {instruction set} of 92 "orders". {Von Neumann} also proposed the {fetch-execute cycle}. [R. F. Clippinger, "A Logical Coding System Applied to the ENIAC", Ballistic Research Laboratory Report No. 673, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, September 1948. {(http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/48eniac-coding)}]. [H. H. Goldstine, "The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann", Princeton University Press, 1972]. [K. Kempf, "Electronic Computers within the Ordnance Corps", Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, 1961. {(http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/61ordnance)}]. [M. H. Weik, "The ENIAC Story", J. American Ordnance Assoc., 1961. {(http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html)}]. [How "general purpose" was ENIAC, compared to Zuse's {Z3}?] (2003-10-01)
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ::: (computer) (ENIAC) The first electronic digital computer and an ancestor of most computers in use today. ENIAC was developed by Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert during World War II at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania.In 1940 Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff attended a lecture by Mauchly and subsequently agreed to show him his binary calculator, the Atanasoff-Berry from the ABC in the design of ENIAC, which was started in June 1943 and released publicly in 1946.ENIAC was not the first digital computer, Konrad Zuse's Z3 was released in 1941. Though, like the ABC, the Z3 was electromechanical rather than electronic, it manual rewiring or switches. Z3 used binary representation like modern computers whereas ENIAC used decimal like mechanical calculators.ENIAC was underwritten and its development overseen by Lieutenant Herman Goldstine of the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL). While the prime prediction, cosmic ray studies, wind tunnel design, petroleum exploration, and optics.ENIAC had 20 registers made entirely from vacuum tubes. It had no other no memory as we currently understand it. The machine performed an addition in 200 microseconds, a multiplication in about three milliseconds, and a division in about 30 milliseconds.John von Neumann, a world-renowned mathematician serving on the BRL Scientific Advisory Committee, soon joined the developers of ENIAC and made some critical contributions. While Mauchly, Eckert and the Penn team continued on the technological problems, he, Goldstine, and others took up the logical problems.In 1947, while working on the design for the successor machine, EDVAC, von Neumann realized that ENIAC's lack of a central control unit could be overcome below). Modifications were undertaken that eventually led to an instruction set of 92 orders. Von Neumann also proposed the fetch-execute cycle.[R. F. Clippinger, A Logical Coding System Applied to the ENIAC, Ballistic Research Laboratory Report No. 673, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, September 1948. ].[H. H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Princeton University Press, 1972].[K. Kempf, Electronic Computers within the Ordnance Corps, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, 1961. ].[M. H. Weik, The ENIAC Story, J. American Ordnance Assoc., 1961. ].[How general purpose was ENIAC, compared to Zuse's Z3?](2003-10-01)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: (1803-1882) American poet and essayist. His spirit of independence early led him to leave the pulpit for the lecture platform where he earned high rank as the leading transcendentalist and the foremost figure in the famous Concord group. His profound vision, his ringing spirit of individualism and his love of democracy place him among the New World's philosophic pantheon. His "The American Scholar," "The Over-Soul," ''Self-Reliance," "Compensation" and the Divinity School Address are perhaps the most famous of his lectures and essays. He edited The Dial, the official organ of the transcendental movement. His several trips to Europe brought him into contact with Coleridge and Wordsworth, but particularly with Carlyle.
exoterics ::: n. pl. --> The public lectures or published writings of Aristotle. See Esoterics.
fachuang. (J. hodo; K. poptang 法幢). In Chinese, "banner of dharma"; in its literal usage, this term refers to the banners that would be raised whenever dharma sermons, rituals, or festivals were held. By extension, the opening or founding of a monastery or lecture hall came to be called the "establishment of the dharma banner" (ji'an fachuang). Metaphorically, the proclamation or exposition of the Buddhist truths was also said to be like raising the dharma banner, which would terrify MĀRA's legions, thus symbolizing the vanquishing of Buddhism's ideological opponents.
Fahua jing lüeshu. (J. Hokekyo ryakusho; K. Pophwa kyong yakso 法華經略疏). In Chinese, "A Brief Commentary on the 'Lotus Sutra,'" the earliest extant Chinese commentary on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, though there is considerable controversy regarding its authenticity. The text is attributed to DAOSHENG from the Liu-Song period (420-479), who was one of the direct disciples of the Kuchean translator KUMĀRAJĪVA. Daosheng claimed that the treatise combined the famous translator's lectures notes on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra with Daosheng's own insights. If authentic, this commentary would be Daosheng's only surviving work, offering a rare perspective into the way the Saddharmapundarīkasutra was understood and interpreted by Kumārajīva and his circle of adherents. Employing expressions found in the Chinese "Book of Changes" (Yijing), this commentary discusses the notions of "consummate perfection" (yuan) and a peculiar MAHĀYĀNA definition of the "middle way" (C. zhongdao, MADHYAMAPRATIPAD), notions that were further elaborated by subsequent TIANTAI and HUAYAN exegetes.
Fahua wenju. (J. Hokke mongu; K. Pophwa mun'gu 法華文句). In Chinese, "Words and Phrases of the 'Lotus Sutra'"; a major commentary on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, taught by TIANTAI ZHIYI and put into writing by his disciple Guanding (561-632), in alt. ten or twenty rolls. Along with the MOHE ZHIGUAN and the FAHUA XUANYI, the Fahua wenju is considered one of Zhiyi's three great commentaries. The lectures that formed the basis of the Fahua wenju were delivered by Zhiyi in 587 at the monastery of Jinzhaisi in Jinling (present-day Jiangsu province), and they offered a thorough exegetical analysis of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. The Fahua wenju was incorporated in the Song-dynasty Buddhist canon at the recommendation of the Tiantai monk Ciyun Zunshi (964-1032) in 1024. The treatise employs a fourfold exegetical technique (sishi) unique to Zhiyi and his TIANTAI ZONG, viz., exegesis via: (1) causes and conditions, (2) classification of the teachings (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI), (3) fundamentals and traces, and (4) contemplation on the mind. Throughout the Fahua wenju, the interpretations of other teachers, such as DAOSHENG, are critiqued. An influential commentary on the Fahua wenju known as the Fahua wenju ji was prepared by JINGXI ZHANRAN.
Fahua xuanyi. (J. Hokke gengi; K. Pophwa hyonŭi 法華玄義). In Chinese, "Profound Meaning of the 'Lotus Sutra,'" taught by the eminent Chinese monk TIANTAI ZHIYI and put into writing by his disciple Guanding (561-632). Along with the MOHE ZHIGUAN and FAHUA WENJU, the Fahua xuanyi is considered one of Zhiyi's three great commentaries. The lectures that form the basis of the Fahua xuanyi were delivered by Zhiyi in 593, perhaps at the monastery of Yuquansi in Jingzhou (present-day Hubei province), and they are concerned with the thorough analysis of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. The treatise is divided into two broader methods of interpretation: general (tongshi) and specific (bieshi). The general interpretation further consists of seven subtypes, such as a listing of the chapters, citations, provenance, and so forth. The specific interpretation consists of five subtypes (see FAHUA WUCHONG XUANYI): the interpretation of the title, determination of its main theme, clarification of its main tenet, discussion of its purpose, and classification of its teachings (panjiao; see JIAOXIANG PANSHI). Nearly two-thirds of the treatise is dedicated to the first two characters in the title of the Chinese translation of the Saddharmapundarīka, "subtle" (miao) and "dharma" (fa).
Faqin. (J. Hokin; K. Pophŭm 法欽) (714-792). In Chinese, "Dharma Reverence"; CHAN master in the NIUTOU ZONG, also known as Daoqin. A chance encounter with the monk HELIN XUANSU when Faqin was twenty-eight is said to have resulted in his decision to become a monk. In 741, Faqin went to Mt. Jing, where he established a small hut to study. Faqin was later summoned in 768 by Emperor Daizong (r. 762-779) to give a lecture in the imperial palace. In honor of his achievements, the emperor bestowed upon him the title Great Master Guoyi (Foremost of the Country) and a plaque for Faqin's monastery that bore the name Jingshansi, or Mt. Jing monastery, which later came to be known as WANSHOUSI. Faqin had many famous disciples; in addition, masters in other Chan lineages, such as XITANG ZHIZANG, TIANHUANG DAOWU, and DANXIA TIANRAN, also sought instruction from Faqin. In 790, Faqin moved to the hermitage Jingtuyuan at the monastery Rongxingsi, where he passed away two years later at the age of seventy-nine. Emperor Dezong (r. 779-805) later gave Faqin the posthumous title Chan master Dajue (Great Awakening).
fayu. (J. hogo; K. pobo 法語). In Chinese, "dharma talk" or "religious discourse," referring broadly to sermons by the Buddha or eminent teachers, teachings that accord with reality (yathābhuta), or talks on topics related to the dharma; rhyming verses or terse essays containing spiritual exhortations are also sometimes called fayu. In the CHAN zong, fayu refer to anecdotal conversations or formal lectures of the patriarchs and masters of the tradition. Chan fayu are typically in colloquial prose, and often offer transcripts of Chan masters' spontaneous utterances on, or specific responses to, real-life contingencies. There are many such anthologies of Chan fayu in the literature, including both collections of the sayings of an individual master and anthologies of the sayings of multiple teachers. See also YULU.
Fazang. (J. Hozo; K. Popchang 法藏) (643-712). Tang-dynasty Chinese monk and putative third patriarch of the HUAYAN ZONG, also known as Xianshou, Dharma Master Guoyi (Nation's Best), Great Master Xiangxiang (Fragrant Elephant), and state preceptor (GUOSHI) Kang Zang. Fazang was the third-generation descendent of immigrants to China from the kingdom of SOGDIANA in Central Asia (the Greek Transoxiana) and thus used as his secular surname the ethnicon KANG. At a young age, Fazang became a student of the Chinese monk ZHIYAN, and studied the AVATAMSAKASuTRA. Fazang was also fluent in several Central Asian languages, and assisted the monks sIKsĀNANDA and YIJING in translating new recensions of the AvataMsakasutra (699) and the LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA (704). Empress WU ZETIAN often requested Fazang to lecture on the AvataMsakasutra and its teachings on PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA. Fazang devoted the rest of his career to the study of the AvataMsakasutra and composing commentaries on the Lankāvatārasutra, FANWANG JING, DASHENG QIXIN LUN, and other texts. Many of Fazang's compositions sought to systematize his teacher Zhiyan's vision of the AvataMsakasutra in terms drawn from indigenous Chinese Buddhist materials, such as the Dasheng qixin lun. In so doing, Fazang developed much of the specific doctrinal terminology and worldview that comes to be emblematic of the Huayan zong, making him the de facto founder of this indigenous school of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. Among Fazang's many works, his HUAYAN JING TANXUAN JI, HUAYAN WUJIAO ZHANG, and his commentary to the Dasheng qixin lun shu ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna") are most famous. Fazang passed away while residing at the monastery of Da Qianfusi. Fazang remained close throughout his life to his Korean colleague ŬISANG, the founder of the Korean Hwaom school, with whom he studied together under Zhiyan, and some of his correspondence with Ŭisang survives. SIMSANG (J. Shinjo) (d. c. 744), another Korean who is claimed to have been a direct disciple of Fazang, was the first transmitter of the Huayan teachings in Japan, and Simsang's own disciple RYoBEN [alt. Roben] (689-773) is considered the founder of the Japanese Kegon school. For discussion of Fazang's philosophical views, see also HUAYAN ZONG; INDRA'S NET; SI FAJIE.
fazhu. (J. hoshu/hosshu; K. popchu 法主). In Chinese, "Lord of the DHARMA," a reverential epithet for the Buddha, e.g., "The World Honored One is the source of the dharma; the World Honored One is the lord of the dharma." In addition, the term fazhu is used to refer to the chief officiant of a religious ritual or ceremony, and with reference to a teacher who give dharma lectures. In China during the Southern and Northern Dynasties (Nanbei chao) period (c. 420-589), fazhu was the title of a minor SAMGHA official who oversaw a monastery's internal affairs. In modern Japan, the term is also used as a title for leaders of different Buddhist sects (when it is then pronounced as hosshu or hossu).
Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco (Kano Yeitan). (1853-1908). An American proponent of Japanese Buddhism and Japanese art. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, to a mother from Salem and a Spanish father, he was part of Boston's East Asian renaissance during the 1890s and one of the first students of the incipient discipline of art history. He studied philosophy at Harvard and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At the age of twenty-five, Fenollosa went to teach at the Imperial University in Japan, where his students introduced him to Buddhism. His interest in the religion grew through his visits to temples near Nara and Kyoto. Fenollosa also became interested in traditional Japanese art and met the aristocratic families who had been court painters during the Tokugawa shogunate. By 1882, Fenollosa was considered enough of an expert to lecture at the Ryuchikai Club and, in 1884, he was named an imperial commissioner of fine arts. Sakurai Keitaku Ajari, the head of the Hoyugin Temple at MIIDERA, became Fenollosa's teacher of Buddhism. Fenollosa received the precepts of TENDAI Buddhism in 1885, making him one of the first Americans to practice MAHĀLĀNA Buddhism. During his time in Japan, he was adopted into the Kano family and received the name Kano Yeitan. He was also presented with the "Order of the Sacred Mirror" by the Meiji emperor. After returning to the United States in 1890, Fenollosa lectured and wrote about Buddhism, became the curator of Far Eastern Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and in 1893 published a poem called East and West. In 1895, he married his second wife, Mary McNeil Scott, and they returned together to Japan, where Fenollosa taught English at Tokyo Higher Normal School. He and Mary remained in Japan until 1900. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, his magnum opus, was published posthumously, with help from Ezra Pound.
FFP ::: Formal FP. A language similar to FP, but with regular sugarless syntax, for machine execution.See also FL.[Can Programming be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs, John Backus, 1977 Turing Award Lecture, CACM 21(8):165-180 (Aug 1978)]. (1994-10-24)
FFP Formal FP. A language similar to FP, but with regular sugarless {syntax}, for machine execution. See also {FL}. ["Can Programming be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs", John Backus, 1977 Turing Award Lecture, CACM 21(8):165-180 (Aug 1978)]. (1994-10-24)
Florentine Academy: It was a loose and informal circle of scholars and educated persons which gathered in Florence around the Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Its activities consisted in regular lectures on Platonic philosophy as well as in informal discussions and parties. "Platonic" love or friendship was considered as the spiritual link between the members of the group which was organized and named after the model of Plato's Academy. The main documents describing it are Ficino's correspondence and a number of dialogues like Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposion, Landino's Disputationes Camaldulenses , and Benedetto Colucci's Declamationes. Outstanding members or associates of the Academy were Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo de'Medici, Angelo Poliziano, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The Academy which was first founded in 1462, dissolved after the revolution in Florence (1494) and after Ficino's death (1499), but the tradition of Platonic philosophy was continued in other private circles as well as at the universities of Florence and Pisa throughout the sixteenth century. -- P.O.K.
FP 1. {functional programming}. 2. {floating-point}. 3. Functional Programming. A {combinator}-based {functional language} by John Backus stressing the use of {higher-order functions}. Implementation by Andy Valencia. {(ftp://apple.com/comp.sources.Unix/volume13)}. See also {FFP}, {FL}, {IFP}, {Berkeley FP}. ["Can Programming be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs", John Backus, 1977 Turing Award Lecture, CACM 21(8):165-180 (Aug 1978)]. 4. "programming" {Function Point}. (1995-03-12)
FP ::: 1. functional programming.2. floating-point.3. Functional Programming. A combinator-based functional language by John Backus stressing the use of higher-order functions.Implementation by Andy Valencia. .See also FFP, FL, IFP, Berkeley FP.[Can Programming be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs, John Backus, 1977 Turing Award Lecture, CACM 21(8):165-180 (Aug 1978)].4. (programming) Function Point. (1995-03-12)
functional programming "programming" (FP) A program in a functional language consists of a set of (possibly {recursive}) {function} definitions and an expression whose value is output as the program's result. Functional languages are one kind of {declarative language}. They are mostly based on the {typed lambda-calculus} with constants. There are no {side-effects} to expression evaluation so an expression, e.g. a function applied to certain arguments, will always evaluate to the same value (if its evaluation terminates). Furthermore, an expression can always be replaced by its value without changing the overall result ({referential transparency}). The order of evaluation of subexpressions is determined by the language's {evaluation strategy}. In a {strict} ({call-by-value}) language this will specify that arguments are evaluated before applying a function whereas in a non-strict ({call-by-name}) language arguments are passed unevaluated. Programs written in a functional language are generally compact and elegant, but have tended, until recently, to run slowly and require a lot of memory. Examples of purely functional languages are {Clean}, {FP}, {Haskell}, {Hope}, {Joy}, {LML}, {Miranda}, and {SML}. Many other languages such as {Lisp} have a subset which is purely functional but also contain non-functional constructs. See also {lazy evaluation}, {reduction}. {Lecture notes (ftp://ftp.cs.olemiss.edu/pub/tech-reports/umcis-1995-01.ps)}. or the same {in dvi-format (ftp://ftp.cs.olemiss.edu/pub/tech-reports/umcis-1995-01.dvi)}. {FAQ (http://cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/gmh/faq.html)}. {SEL-HPC Article Archive (http://lpac.ac.uk/SEL-HPC/Articles/)}. (2003-03-25)
Ganjin. (C. Jianzhen 鑑眞) (688-763). Chinese VINAYA master and reputed founder of the RISSHu and the monastery of ToSHoDAIJI in Japan; also known as Todai Wajo. Ganjin was a native of Guangling, Yangzhou, in present-day Jiangsu province. He studied TIANTAI thought and practice and the vinaya under the vinaya master Dao'an (654-717). Having returned to Yangzhou from his studies in Chang'an and Luoyang, he led an illustrious career at the monastery of Damingsi as a famous lecturer on the vinaya of the NANSHAN LÜ ZONG, and is credited with the establishment of many monasteries. In 733, two monks from Nara, Eiei (d. 748) and Fusho (d.u.), arrived in China. While studying in Chang'an, they learned of Ganjin and headed for Damingsi in 742 to meet him. The next year, Ganjin made his first attempt to go to Japan. After four more failed attempts, Ganjin was finally able to arrive in Japan in 754. During his earlier attempts, Ganjin had lost his eyesight and Eiei had lost his life. Upon his arrival, he was warmly welcomed by retired Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749) and the Buddhist community in Japan. In the summer of 754, an ordination platform was prepared at the great Nara monastery of ToDAIJI, where Ganjin conferred the precepts on Emperor Shomu and others. A precepts hall was constructed the next year in 755. In 756, Ganjin and RYoBEN (689-773), the abbot of Todaiji, were appointed to senior ecclesiastical positions at court. A year after Empress Koken (r. 749-758) abdicated the throne in 758, a new monastery, named Toritsu Shodaiji (alt. Toshodaiji), was built and granted to Ganjin. In 763, as death neared, Ganjin had a statue of himself made and installed in his quarters at Toshodaiji, which remains to this day.
Gathas Series of spiritual teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan based on a number of his lectures. Gathas were meant as part of a school that prepared followers for a (next) circle of learning. The selection of the lectures and the compiling of the different volumes of teachings were done by Murshida Sharifa Goodenough, a pupil of Hazrat Inayat Khan, in her capacity as Madar-ul-Maham, the secretary-general of the Sufi Order, the primary esoteric activity of the Sufi Movement. This system of consecutive teachings is grouped respectively: Gathekas (for interested individuals), Gathas, Githas, Sangathas and Sangithas.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika. (1898-1985). Born Ernst Lothar Hoffmann in Kassel, Germany, he served in the German army during World War I, after which he continued his studies at Freiburg University in Switzerland. He became interested in Buddhism while living with expatriate European and American artists on the Italian island of Capri, during which time he published his first book, The Basic Ideas of Buddhism and Its Relationship to Ideas of God (1920). In 1928, he sailed for Ceylon, where he studied meditation and Buddhist philosophy briefly with the German-born THERAVĀDA monk NĀnATILOKA MAHĀTHERA (who gave him the name Govinda), before leaving to travel in Burma and India. While visiting Darjeeling in the Himalayas in 1931, he was driven by a spring snowstorm to a Tibetan monastery at Ghoom, where he met Tomo (Gro mo) Geshe Rimpoche, a DGE LUGS PA lama. Govinda later held brief teaching positions at the University of Patna and at Shantiniketan, publishing essays in The Mahā Bodhi, the journal of the MAHĀBODHI SOCIETY, as well as various Theosophical journals. His lectures at Patna resulted in his book The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy (1961) and his lectures at Shantiniketan led to Psycho-Cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa. While at Shantiniketan he met a Parsi woman, Rati Petit (who assumed the name Li Gotami), whom he would marry in 1947. In 1942, he was interned by the British at Dehra Dun along with other German nationals, including Heinrich Harrer. During 1947-1948, Lama Govinda and Li Gotami traveled to some of the temples of western Tibet. During their travels, they met a lama named Ajorepa Rimpoche, who, according to Govinda, initiated them into the BKA' BRGYUD order. Returning from Tibet, Lama Govinda and Li Gotami set up permanent residence in India, publishing Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism in 1960. He spent the last two decades before his death in 1985 lecturing in Europe and the United States. His last years were spent in a home in Mill Valley, California, provided by the San Francisco Zen Center.
Gunavarman. (C. Qiunabamo; J. Gunabatsuma; K. Kunabalma 求那跋摩) (367-431 CE). A Kashmiri monk who was an important early translator of Buddhist VINAYA and BODHISATTVA preceptive materials into Chinese. He was a prince of Kubhā, who was ordained at the age of twenty and eventually became known as a specialist in the Buddhist canon (TREPItAKA). Upon his father's death, he was offered the throne, but refused, and instead embarked on travels throughout Asia to preach the dharma, including to Java, where he helped to establish the Buddhist tradition. Various miracles are associated with the places he visited, such as fragrance wafting in the air when he meditated and a dragon-like creature who was seen ascending to heaven in his presence. In 424 CE, Gunavarman traveled to China and was invited by Emperor Wen of the Liu Song dynasty to come to the capital in Nanjing. Upon his arrival, a monastery was built in his honor and Gunavarman lectured there on various sutras. During his sojourn in China, he translated some eighteen rolls of seminal Buddhist texts into Chinese, including the BODHISATTVABHuMI, and several other works associated with the BODHISATTVAsĪLA, the DHARMAGUPTAKA VINAYA (SIFEN LÜ), and monastic and lay precepts. Gunavarman was a central figure in founding the order of nuns (BHIKsUNĪ) in China and he helped arrange the ordination of several Chinese nuns whose hagiographies are recorded in the BIQIUNI ZHUAN.
Gyonen. (凝然) (1240-1321). Japanese monk associated with the Kegonshu doctrinal school (HUAYAN ZONG). Gyonen was a scion of the Fujiwara clan, one of the most influential aristocratic families in Japan, who ordained at sixteen and subsequently moved to ToDAIJI, where he eventually became abbot. At Todaiji, he lectured frequently on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, the central text of the Kegonshu, and was also invited to lecture on FAZANG's WUJIAO CHANG at the imperial court, which awarded him the honorary title of state preceptor (J. kokushi; C. GUOSHI). Gyonen wrote over 125 works, all in literary Chinese, which ran the gamut from SuTRA exegesis, to biography, to ritual music. Gyonen's interest in Buddhist doctrine was not limited to the Kegon school. His most famous work is his HASSHu KoYo ("Essentials of the Eight Traditions"), which provides a systematic overview of the history and doctrines of the eight major schools that were dominant in Japanese Buddhism during the Nara and Heian periods. Gyonen's portrayal of Japanese Buddhism as a collection of independent schools identified by discrete doctrines and independent lines of transmission had a profound impact on Japanese Buddhist studies into the modern period.
Hakuin Ekaku. (白隱慧鶴) (1685-1768). Japanese ZEN master renowned for revitalizing the RINZAISHu. Hakuin was a native of Hara in Shizuoka Prefecture. In 1699, Hakuin was ordained and received the name Ekaku (Wise Crane) from the monk Tanrei Soden (d. 1701) at the nearby temple of Shoinji. Shortly thereafter, Hakuin was sent by Tanrei to the temple of Daishoji in Numazu to serve the abbot Sokudo Fueki (d. 1712). Hakuin is then said to have lost faith in his Buddhist training and devoted much of his time instead to art. In 1704, Hakuin visited the monk Bao Sochiku (1629-1711) at the temple Zuiunji in Mino province. While studying under Bao, Hakuin is said to have read the CHANGUAN CEJIN by YUNQI ZHUHONG, which inspired him to further meditative training. In 1708, Hakuin is said to have had his first awakening experience upon hearing the ringing of a distant bell. That same year, Hakuin met Doju Sokaku (1679-1730), who urged him to visit the Zen master Dokyo Etan (1642-1721), or Shoju Ronin, at the hermitage of Shojuan in Iiyama. During one of his begging rounds, Hakuin is said to have had another important awakening after an old woman struck him with a broom. Shortly after his departure from Shojuan, Hakuin suffered from an illness, which he cured with the help of a legendary hermit named Hakuyu. Hakuin's famous story of his encounter with Hakuyu was recounted in his YASENKANNA, Orategama, and Itsumadegusa. In 1716, Hakuin returned to Shoinji and devoted much of his time to restoring the monastery, teaching students, and lecturing. Hakuin delivered famous lectures on such texts as the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, BIYAN LU, BAOJING SANMEI, DAHUI PUJUE CHANSHI SHU, and YUANREN LUN, and the recorded sayings (YULU) of LINJI YIXUAN, WUZU FAYAN, and XUTANG ZHIYU. He also composed a number of important texts during this period, such as the Kanzan shi sendai kimon, Kaian kokugo, and SOKKoROKU KAIEN FUSETSU. Prior to his death, Hakuin established the monastery of Ryutakuji in Mishima (present-day Shizuoka prefecture). Hakuin was a strong advocate of "questioning meditation" (J. kanna Zen; C. KANHUA CHAN), which focused on the role of doubt in contemplating the koan (GONG'AN). Hakuin proposed that the sense of doubt was the catalyst for an initial SATORI (awakening; C. WU), which had then to be enhanced through further koan study in order to mature the experience. The contemporary Rinzai training system involving systematic study of many different koans is attributed to Hakuin, as is the famous koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" (see SEKISHU KoAN). Hakuin was a prolific writer who left many other works as well, including the Dokugo shingyo, Oniazami, Yabukoji, Hebiichigo, Keiso dokuzui, Yaemugura, and Zazen wasan. Hakuin also produced many prominent disciples, including ToREI ENJI, Suio Genro (1716-1789), and GASAN JITo. The contemporary Japanese Rinzai school of Zen traces its lineage and teachings back to Hakuin and his disciples.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Born at Stuttgart in 1770 and died at Berlin in 1831. He studied theology, philosophy and the classics at Tübingen, 1788-93, occupied the conventional position of tutor in Switzerland and Frankfort on the Main, 1794-1800, and went to Jena as Privatdocent in philosophy in 1801. He was promoted to a professorship at Jena in 1805, but was driven from the city the next year by the incursion of the French under Napoleon. He then went to Bamberg, where he remained two years as editor of a newspaper. The next eight years he spent as director of the Gymnasium at Nürnberg. In 1816 he accepted a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, from which position he was called two years later to succeed Fichte at the University of Berlin. While at Jena, he co-operated with Schelling in editing the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, to which he contributed many articles. His more important volumes were published as follows: Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807; Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812-16; Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 1817; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1820. Shortly after his death his lectures on the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and aesthetics were published from the collated lecture-notes of his students. His collected works in nineteen volumes were published 1832-40 by a group of his students. -- G.W.C.
Huangbo Xiyun. (J. obaku Kiun; K. Hwangbyok Hŭiun 黄檗希運) (d. 850). Chinese CHAN master of the Tang dynasty. Huangbo was a native of Min in present-day Fujian province. Little is known of his early life, but he eventually became a monk on Mt. Huangbo in Fuzhou (present-day Fuzhou province). Huangbo later became the disciple of the eminent Chan master BAIZHANG HUAIHAI, a first-generation successor to MAZU DAOYI. After he left Baizhang's side, Huangbo became the abbot of the monastery of Da'ansi where he trained many students. At the invitation of the powerful minister of state Pei Xiu (787-860), Huangbo left for Zhongling (present-day Jiangxi province) and began to reside on a local mountain that he renamed Mt. Huangbo, whence he acquired his toponym. During this period, Huangbo acquired many more disciples and established himself as a major Chan master. In 842, Huangbo relocated to the monastery of Longxingsi and again to Kaiyuansi in Wanling (present-day Anhui province) in 848. His most famous disciple is LINJI YIXUAN (d. 867) whose lineage became the dominant Chan school in China, the eponymous LINJI ZONG. Huangbo's teachings focus on the notion of the "one mind" (YIXIN) that vivifies all things, including enlightened buddhas and unenlightened sentient beings. Chan practice therefore involves simply bringing an end to all discriminative thought so that the one mind will be made manifest. Pei Xiu compiled his notes of Huangbo's lectures, which he titled the CHUANXIN FAYAO. Huangbo received the posthumous title Chan master Duanji (Eradicating Limits).
Huayan youyi. (J. Kegon yui; K. Hwaom yuŭi 華嚴遊意). In Chinese, "An Excursion through the Meaning of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA," a brief one-roll commentary on the AvataMsakasutra, composed by JIZANG, between 597 and 599; it is reported to be a record of his oral lectures on the scripture delivered in Yangzhou. The work contains a rare SAN LUN ZONG perspective on the AvataMsakasutra, before the HUAYAN ZONG's own influential commentaries came to monopolize the interpretation of the scripture. This work is of particular interest because it also critiqued contemporaneous exegetical traditions in both north and south China.
Hŭngdoksa. (興德寺). In Korean, "Flourishing Virtue Monastery"; the head monastery of the school of SoN (Meditation) during the Choson dynasty, located in Sodaemun-ku in the capital of Seoul. The monastery was constructed in 1401 at the command of the abdicated first king of Choson, Taejo (r. 1392-1398), to the east of the king's old residence; it was intended to serve as a source of blessings for his kingdom, his ancestors, his people, and his royal lineage. This monastery became the chief head monastery (tohoeso) in 1424, when the seven schools of Choson-dynasty Buddhism were amalgamated into the two schools of KYO (doctrine) and SoN (meditation). To the sides of the main shrine hall were two halls, one for Son meditation, the other for doctrinal lectures. The monastery was destroyed during the reign of King Yonsan (r. 1494-1506) and never reconstructed.
Hwansong Chian. (喚醒志安) (1664-1729). Korean monk from the mid-Choson dynasty. Hwansong Chian was a disciple of Woltam Solche (1632-1704) and of Moun Chinon (1622-1703), at the time was the most respected Hwaom (HUAYAN) scholar in the kingdom. At Chinon's request, Hwansong Chian began to lecture on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA in Chinon's place. Chinon eventually entrusted his disciples to Chian, and Chian thus acquired a name for himself as a Hwaom master. In 1725, he held a grand Hwaom lecture and attracted more than fourteen hundred listeners. Given the suspicion Buddhist activities engendered during this time of the religion's persecution, the government was deeply concerned about the potentially seditious impact of his lectures and consequently had him arrested and imprisoned. Chian was released after it was eventually revealed that he was falsely accused. Subsequently, a high Confucian official from Cholla province petitioned for his arrest, and he was sent into exile on Cheju island, where he died seven days later on July 7, 1729. His writings include the Sonmun ojong kangyo and the Hwansong chip.
Hyeyong. (惠永) (1228-1294). Korean monk of the Koryo dynasty. In 1238, Hyeyong was ordained by Ch'ungyon (d.u.) at the monastery of Nambaegwolsa. Hyeyong passed the Son (CHAN) examinations held at WANGNYUNSA in 1244 and was subsequently given a position at Hŭngdoksa. In 1259, he was given the title Samjung taesa, and four years later, he was elevated to the status of head seat (sujwa). In 1267, Hyeyong moved to the temple Songnisa. Hyeyong's reputation grew, and he was eventually elevated to the highest status of SAMGHA overseer (sŭngt'ong) in 1269. He also resided at such monasteries as PULGUKSA, T'ONGDOSA, and Chunghŭngsa. In 1290, he led a mission of one hundred monks who specialized in copying Buddhist scriptures to Yuan China and delivered a lecture in the capital. He also copied the Buddhist canon in gold. In 1292, he was given the title Poja Kukchon (National Worthy whose Compassion is Universal) and was also given the title of saMgha overseer of the five teachings (Ogyodo Sŭngtong). He resided at the monastery of Tonghwasa and remained there until his death in 1294. Hyeyong composed a treatise entitled the Paegŭihae.
Imam (A) (literally: someone who is being followed or imitated) Guide or spiritual leader in the tradition of the Islam. Also lecturer in a mosque.
James, William: (1842-1910) Unquestionably one of the most influential of American thinkers, William James began his career as a teacher shortly after graduation (MD, 1870) from Harvard University. He became widely known as a brilliant and original lecturer, and his already considerable reputation was greatly enhanced in 1890 when his Principles of Psychology made its appearance. Had James written no other work, his position in American philosophy and psychology would be secure; the vividness and clarity of his style no less than the keenness of his analysis roused the imagination of a public in this country which had long been apathetic to the more abstract problems of technical philosophy. Nor did James allow this rising interest to flag. Turning to religious and moral problems, and later to metaphysics, he produced a large number of writings which gave ample evidence of his amazing ability to cut through the cumbersome terminology of traditional statement and to lay bare the essential character of the matter in hand. In this sense, James was able to revivify philosophical issues long buried from any save the classical scholars. Such oversimplifications as exist, for example, in his own "pragmatism" and "radical empiricism" must be weighed against his great accomplishment in clearing such problems as that of the One and the Many from the dry rot of centuries, and in rendering such problems immediately relevant to practical and personal difficulties. -- W.S.W.
Jingxi Zhanran. (J. Keikei Tannen; K. Hyonggye Tamyon 荊溪湛然) (711-782). Chinese monk who is the putative ninth patriarch of the TIANTAI ZONG; also known as Great Master Miaole (Sublime Bliss) and Dharma Master Jizhu (Lord of Exegesis). Zhanran was a native of Jingqi in present-day Jiangsu province. At age nineteen, Zhanran became a student of the monk Xuanlang (673-754), who had revitalized the community on Mt. Tiantai. After Xuanlang's death, Zhanran continued his efforts to unify the disparate regional centers of Tiantai learning under the school's banner; for his efforts, Zhanran is remembered as one of the great revitalizers of the Tiantai tradition. A gifted exegete who composed numerous commentaries on the treatises of TIANTAI ZHIYI, Zhanran established Zhiyi's MOHE ZHIGUAN, FAHUA XUANYI, and FAHUA WENJU as the three central texts of the Tiantai exegetical tradition. His commentary on the Mohe zhiguan, the MOHE ZHIGUAN FUXING ZHUANHONG JUE, is the first work to correlate ZHIGUAN (calmness and insight) practice as outlined by Zhiyi with the teachings of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), the central scripture of the Tiantai tradition. In his JINGANG PI ("Adamantine Scalpel"), Zhanran argued in favor of the controversial proposition that insentient beings also possess the buddha-nature (FOXING). Zhanran's interpretation of Tiantai doctrine and the distinction he drew between his own tradition and the rival schools of the HUAYAN ZONG and CHAN ZONG set the stage for the internal Tiantai debates during the Song dynasty between its on-mountain (shanjia) and off-mountain (shanwai) branches (see SHANJIA SHANWAI). Zhanran lectured at various monasteries throughout the country and was later invited by emperors Xuanzong (r. 712-756), Suzong (r. 756-762), and Daizong (r. 762-779) to lecture at court, before retiring to the monastery Guoqingsi on Mt. Tiantai.
Jiun Onko. (慈雲飮光) (1718-1804). In Japanese, "Cloud of Compassion, Drinker of Light"; a monk of the Shingon Risshu school, which combined the esoteric teachings of the SHINGONSHu with disciplinary observance of the VINAYA; also known as Jiun Sonja. Up to the age of twelve, he received a traditional Confucian education, but after his father's death the following year, he was entrusted to Horakuji, a Shingon Risshu monastery in Kawachi (present-day osaka prefecture), where he studied esoteric teachings and the SIDDHAM Sanskrit syllabary. During his early studies of Buddhism, Jiun came to realize the centrality of the PRĀTIMOKsA precepts to a monastic vocation, and in 1738 decided to take the full set of monk's precepts (J. gusokukai) at the monastery of Yachuji. In the following year, Jiun was appointed abbot of his old monastery of Horakuji, but he resigned two years later to dedicate himself to ZEN practice in the SoToSHu. In his late twenties, he founded a movement called the "vinaya of the true dharma" (shoboritsu), which encouraged Buddhist clerics to commit themselves to the prātimoksa precepts, regardless of their sectarian affiliations. In 1758, Jiun wrote a massive textbook on Sanskrit, the thousand-roll Bongaku shinryo ("The Ford and Bridge to Sanskrit Studies"), the first such study aid published in Japan. In 1775, he compiled his Juzen hogo ("Dharma Discourses on the Ten Wholesome Ways of Action"), a collection of lectures on the KUsALA-KARMAPATHA that he had delivered the two previous years at Amidadera in Kyoto. Late in his life, he moved to KATSURAGISAN, where he pioneered an eclectic religious movement that came to be called Unden SHINTo ("Shinto transmitted by Jiun") or Katsuragi Shinto, which integrated Shingon, Zen, and Confucianism with Japanese indigenous religion.
Jizang. (J. Kichizo; K. Kilchang 吉藏) (549-623). In Chinese, "Storehouse of Auspiciousness"; Chinese Buddhist monk of originally Parthian descent and exegete within the SAN LUN ZONG, the Chinese counterpart of the MADHYAMAKA school of Indian thought. At a young age, he is said to have met the Indian translator PARAMĀRTHA, who gave him his dharma name. Jizang is also known to have frequented the lectures of the monk Falang (507-581) with his father, who was also ordained monk. Jizang eventually was ordained by Falang, under whom he studied the so-called Three Treatises (SAN LUN), the foundational texts of the Chinese counterpart of the Madhyamaka school: namely, the Zhong lun (MuLAMADHYAMAKĀRIKĀ), BAI LUN (*sATAsĀSTRA), and SHI'ERMEN LUN (*Dvādasamukhasāstra). At the age of twenty-one, Jizang received the full monastic precepts. After Falang's death in 581, Jizang moved to the monastery of Jiaxiangsi in Huiji (present-day Zhejiang province). There, he devoted himself to lecturing and writing and is said to have attracted more than a thousand students. In 598, Jizang wrote a letter to TIANTAI ZHIYI, inviting him to lecture on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. In 606, Emperor Yang (r. 604-617) constructed four major centers of Buddhism around the country and assigned Jizang to one in Yangzhou (present-day Jiangsu province). During this period, Jizang composed his influential overview of the doctrines of the Three Treatises school, entitled the SAN LUN XUANYI. Jizang's efforts to promote the study of the three treatises earned him the name "reviver of the San lun tradition." Jizang was a prolific writer who composed numerous commentaries on the three treatises, the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA, VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, etc., as well as an overview of Mahāyāna doctrine, entitled the Dasheng xuan lun.
J. W. Young, Lectures on Fundamental Concepts of Algebra and Geometry, New York, 1911.
Kakukai. [alt. Kakkai] (覺海) (1142-1223). An early Kamakura-period Japanese scholar-monk from Keoin temple on Mt. Koya (see KoYASAN), and the thirty-seventh temple administrator (J. kengyo) of Kongobuji; his sobriquet was Nanshobo. Kakukai is especially known for his "immanentalist" SHINGON pure land thought, emphasizing the position that this very world is itself the PURE LAND, and that seeking rebirth in the pure land as a post-mortem destination should not be the main goal of Buddhist practice. His views on the pure land are similar to those of KAKUBAN. However, Kakuban, like Kakukai's student DoHAN, viewed the post-mortem attainment of rebirth in a pure land as a worthwhile goal. Many of Kakukai's students, such as Dohan, Hossho, Shinben, and others, came to be regarded as paragons of the Shingon academic tradition on Mt. Koya. Kakukai is also the author of an important medieval dharma lecture (J. hogo) written in vernacular Japanese entitled Kakukai hokkyo hogo.
kanhua Chan. (J. kannazen/kanwazen; K. kanhwa Son 看話禪). In Chinese, "Chan of investigating the topic of inquiry," or, more freely, "questioning meditation." The systematization of this meditative practice is commonly traced back to the writings of the Song-dynasty CHAN master DAHUI ZONGGAO. The kanhua Chan technique grew out of the growing interest in the study of "public cases" (GONG'AN), viz., old stories and anecdotes of Chan masters, which flourished during the Song dynasty. Dahui's teacher YUANWU KEQIN is also known to have lectured on numerous public cases, and his anthology of gong'an, along with his analysis of them, was recorded in the famous collection the BIYAN LU ("Blue Cliff Records"). Dahui further elaborated upon Yuanwu's investigation of public cases and applied this process to the practice of Chan meditation. In his lectures and letters (DAHUI PUJUE CHANSHI SHU), Dahui urged his students (many of whom were educated literati) to use the gong'an as a "topic of meditative inquiry" (HUATOU, K. hwadu), rather than interpret it from purely intellectual or conceptual perspectives. Perhaps the most famous huatou is the topic "no" (WU) attributed to the Chan master ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN: A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have buddha-nature (FOXING), or not?" to which Zhaozhou replied "WU" ("no"; lit. "it does not have it"). (See WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING.) (Because of the popularity of this one-word meditative topic, kanhua Chan is often interpreted to mean the investigation of the "critical phrase" or "keyword," in which the "keyword" "wu" is presumed to have been extracted from the longer gong'an exchange.) The investigation of this huatou starts by "investigating the meaning" (C. canyi; K. ch'amŭi) of the huatou: what could Zhaozhou have meant by answering "no" to this question, when the right answer should be "yes"? The mainstream of East Asian Buddhist doctrine insists that all sentient beings, including dogs, are inherently enlightened and thus do in fact possess the buddha-nature, so this question promotes inquiry. Examining what Zhaozhou might have meant by saying "no" has what Dahui termed "taste" (C. wei, K. mi), meaning intellectual interest. As one's intellectual inquiry into this question continues, however, the student is ultimately left with "doubt" (YIQING), viz., the inability of the (unenlightened) mind to understand Zhaozhou's motive in giving this response to the student's question. Doubt, Dahui says, renders the mind "puzzled, frustrated, and tasteless" (viz., lacking intellectual interest), just as if you were gnawing on an iron rod." Once doubt arises, there is no longer any conceptual support for the meditation, and the student moves on to "investigating the word" (C. canju; K. ch'amgu), viz., just sitting with the huatou wu and no longer trying to understand Zhaozhou's motive in offering this response. At this point, the huatou becomes a "live word" (C. huoju; K. hwalgu) that helps to free the mind from conceptualization and to lead the meditator forward toward liberation. As the sense of doubt becomes more and more intense, it finally "explodes" (C. po; K. p'a), bringing an end to the deluded processes of thought and removing the limiting point of view that is the self. Once the distinctions between self and other disintegrate, the meditator experiences the interconnection between himself or herself and all the phenomena in the universe (SHISHI WU'AI). Kanhua Chan, therefore, employs the inevitable doubt that a benighted person would have about the sayings of the enlightened Chan masters of old to create a powerful sense of inquiry that leads the meditator toward the experience of nonconceptualization and finally enlightenment. ¶ Dahui's system of kanhua Chan was first taught in Korea by POJO CHINUL, where it is known as kanhwa Son, and popularized by Chinul's successor, CHIN'GAK HYESIM. Kanhwa Son continues to be the most common contemplative technique practiced in Korean Son halls. Korean Son monks typically work on one hwadu-often Zhaozhou's "no"-for much of their career, continually deepening their experience of that topic. In China, after the Ming dynasty, kanhua Chan merged with the recitation of the buddha AMITĀBHA's name (NIANFO), so that Chan meditators would turn the recitation into a huatou by reflecting on the topic "Who is reciting the Buddha's name?" In Japanese Zen, due in large part to the efforts of HAKUIN EKAKU and his disciples, kannazen became widespread within the RINZAI ZEN tradition, where it was incorporated into an elaborate system of koan training, involving the systematic investigation of many different koans.
Kapleau, Philip. (1912-2004). Influential twentieth-century American teacher of Zen Buddhism. Kapleau worked as a court reporter at the war crimes trials following World War II, first in Nuremberg and then in Tokyo. He met D. T. SUZUKI in Japan in 1948 and later attended his lectures at Columbia University in 1950. He returned to Japan in 1953, where he spent the next thirteen years practicing Zen, the last ten under YASUTANI HAKUUN (1885-1973), a Zen priest who had severed his ties to the SoTo sect in order to form his own organization, called Sanbokyodan, the "Three Treasures Association," which taught Zen meditation to laypeople. Kapleau returned to the United States in 1965 and in the following year founded the Zen Center of Rochester, New York. While in Japan, Kapleau drew on his training as a court reporter to transcribe and translate Yasutani's instructions on Zen meditation, along with his formal interviews (DOKUSAN) with his students, and testimonials of their enlightenment experiences. These were compiled into The Three Pillars in Zen, first published in Japan in 1965, a work that influenced many Westerners to undertake Zen practice; it is widely recognized as a classic of the nascent American tradition of Zen Buddhism. As one of the first non-Japanese Zen teachers in America, Kapleau set out in this book to adapt some of the forms of Zen practice that he thought would be better suited to an American audience. Kapleau's modifications included an English translation of the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA ("Heart Sutra"). Yasutani was strongly opposed to the use of the translation, arguing that the sound of the words was more important than their meaning. Teacher and student broke over this question in 1967 and never spoke again. Kapleau, however, remained dedicated to Yasutani, and the Rochester Zen Center flourished under Kapleau's direction.
Kazi Dawa Samdup. (Ka dzi Zla ba bsam 'grub) (1868-1922). An early translator from Tibetan to English, best known for his work with WALTER EVANS-WENTZ as translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He apparently had wished to pursue the religious life but, as the eldest son in his family, was unable to do so. He was a disciple of a Bhutanese lama, one Guru Norbu, who was affiliated with the 'BRUG PA BKA' BRGYUD sect. Kazi Dawa Samdup served as a translator for such figures as ALEXANDRA DAVID-NÉEL, Charles Bell, and John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) and also was a member of the political staff of the thirteenth DALAI LAMA during his sojourn in Sikkim and India. In 1919, he published a 20,000-word English-Tibetan dictionary. Also in 1919, he was serving as the English teacher at the Maharaja's Boys' School in Gangtok, when the local police chief introduced him to Evans-Wentz. He agreed to provide a translation of a Tibetan text that Evans-Wentz had acquired, the BAR DO THOS GROL CHEN MO. The translations that Kazi Dawa Samdup made for Evans-Wentz eventually appeared in three books: The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927), Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954). He was subsequently appointed to the post of lecturer in Tibetan at the University of Calcutta. In 1924, after his death, Evans-Wentz visited Kazi Dawa Samdup's family in Kalimpong, from whom he received a manuscript translation of the MI LA RAS PA'I RNAM THAR, a famous biography of MI LA RAS PA, which Evans-Wentz subsequently edited and published as Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa (1928). Although Evans-Wentz's notes and prefaces to these works contain many fanciful elements, Kazi Dawa Samdup's translations are generally well regarded.
Keizan Jokin. (瑩山紹瑾) (1268-1325). Japanese ZEN master and putative second patriarch of the SoTo Zen tradition. Keizan was a native of Echizen in present-day Fukui prefecture. Little is known of his early years, but Keizan is said to have been influenced by his mother, who was a pious devotee of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA. Keizan went to the nearby monastery of EIHEIJI and studied under the Zen master Gikai (1219-1309), a disciple of DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253). He was later ordained by the monk Ejo (1198-1280). After Ejo's death, Keizan went to the nearby monastery of Hokyoji and continued his studies under another disciple of Dogen, Jakuen (1207-1299). At age twenty-eight, Keizan was invited as the founding abbot (kaisan; C. KAISHAN) of the monastery of Jomanji in Awa (present-day Tokushima prefecture). The next year, Keizan briefly visited Eiheiji to train in the conferral of bodhisattva precepts (bosatsukai; PUSA JIE; see also BODHISATTVAsĪLA) under the guidance of the abbot Gien (d. 1313). Keizan returned to Jomanji the very same year and began to confer precepts. Several years later, Keizan joined Gikai once more at the latter's new temple of Daijoji in Ishikawa and became his disciple. Three years later, Keizan succeeded Gikai as abbot of Daijoji. In 1300, Keizan began his lectures on what would eventually come to be known as the DENKoROKU. In 1311, while setting the regulations for Daijoji, Keizan composed the ZAZEN YoJINKI and Shinjinmei nentei. He also entrusted Daijoji to his disciple Meiho Sotetsu (1277-1350) and established the monastery of Jojuji in nearby Kaga. In 1317, Keizan established the monastery of Yokoji on Mt. Tokoku. Keizan also came into possession of a local temple known as Morookadera, which was renamed SoJIJI. In 1322, Yokoji and Sojiji were sanctioned as official monasteries by Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339). This sanction is traditionally considered to mark the official establishment of Soto as an independent Zen institution. Keizan later entrusted the monastery of Sojiji to his disciple Gasan Joseki (1276-1366) and retired to Yokoji. In the years before his death, Keizan built a buddha hall, founder's hall, dharma hall, and monk's hall at Yokoji.
Kern, Hendrik. (1833-1917). Important Dutch scholar of Sanskrit and Buddhism. Born Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern to Dutch parents in the Dutch East Indies, his family returned to the Netherlands when he was six years old. Beginning in 1851, he studied Sanskrit at Leiden and then in Berlin (with Albrecht Weber) before returning to the Netherlands as a lecturer in Greek. In 1863, he accepted an invitation to teach Sanskrit in Benares, returning in 1865 to become professor of Sanskrit at Leiden University, a position that he held until his retirement in 1903. He commanded a remarkable array of languages and published on a wide range of topics, mostly writing in his native Dutch. In 1884, he published the first English-language translation of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") as part of MAX MÜLLER's Sacred Books of the East series; a French translation of the sutra by EUGÈNE BURNOUF had been published in 1852. Kern published an edition of the Nepalese manuscript in 1912. His chief contribution to Buddhist Studies was his two-volume Geschiedenis van het Buddhisme in Indië (History of Buddhism in India) published in 1882-1884, in which he put forward the view that the Buddha was a solar god, with the twelve NIDĀNAS, representing the twelve months, etc. In this work, he also argued for the influence of the Yoga school on early Buddhism.
Kukai. (空海) (774-835). In Japanese, "Sea of Emptiness"; monk who is considered the founder of the tradition, often referred to as the SHINGONSHu, Tomitsu, or simply MIKKYo. He is often known by his posthumous title KoBo DAISHI, or "Great Master Who Spread the Dharma," which was granted to him by Emperor Daigo in 921. A native of Sanuki province on the island of Shikoku, Kukai came from a prominent local family. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Nara, where he studied the Chinese classics and was preparing to become a government official. However, he seems to have grown disillusioned with this life. At the age of twenty, Kukai was ordained, perhaps by the priest Gonso, and the following year he took the full precepts at ToDAIJI. He is claimed to have experienced an awakening while performing the Kokuzo gumonjiho, a ritual dedicated to the mantra of the BODHISATTVA ĀKĀsAGARBHA. While studying Buddhist texts on his own, Kukai is said to have encountered the MAHĀVAIROCANĀBHISAMBODHISuTRA and, unable to find a master who could teach him to read its MANTRAs, decided to travel to China to learn from masters there. In 804, he was selected as a member of a delegation to China that set sail in four ships; SAICHo was aboard another of the ships. Kukai eventually traveled to the Tang capital of Chang'an, where he studied tantric MIJIAO Buddhist rituals and theory under HUIGUO and Sanskrit under the Indian monk PRAJNA. Under the direction of his Chinese master, Kukai was initiated into the two realm (ryobu) MAndALA lineages of YIXING, sUBHAKARASIMHA, VAJRABODHI, and AMOGHAVAJRA. In 806, Kukai returned to Japan; records of the texts and implements he brought with him are preserved in the Shorai mokuroku. Little is known about his activities until 809, when he moved to Mt. Takao by imperial request. Kukai described his new teachings as mikkyo, or "secret teachings," VAJRAYĀNA (J. kongojo), and MANTRAYĀNA (J. shingonjo). At the core of Kukai's doctrinal and ritual program was the belief that all acts of body, speech, and mind are rooted in, and expressions of, the cosmic buddha MAHĀVAIROCANA (see VAIROCANA), as the DHARMAKĀYA. Kukai argued that the dharmakāya itself teaches through the artistic and ritual forms that he brought to Japan. Once his teachings gained some renown, Kukai conducted several ABHIsEKA ceremonies, including one for the TENDAI patriarch SAICHo and his disciples. However, Kukai and Saicho's relationship soured when Kukai refused to transmit the highest level of initiation to Saicho. In 816, Emperor Saga granted Kukai rights to KoYASAN, to serve as a training center for his Shingon mikkyo tradition. In early 823, Kukai was granted the temple of ToJI in Kyoto, which became a second center for the Shingon tradition. In the summer of 825, Kukai built a lecture hall at Toji, and in 827 he was promoted to senior assistant high priest in the Bureau of Clergy. In 829, he built an abhiseka platform at Todaiji. In early 834, he received permission to establish a Shingon chapel within the imperial palace, where he constructed a mandala altar. Kukai passed into eternal SAMĀDHI (J. nyujo) in 835 on Mt. Koya, and it is said that he remains in his mausoleum in meditation waiting for the BODHISATTVA MAITREYA to appear. Kukai authored a number of important texts, including the BENKENMITSU NIKYoRON, a treatise outlining the inherent differences of kengyo (revealed) and mikkyo (inner) teachings; Sokushin jobutsugi, a treatise on the doctrine of attainment of buddhahood in "this very body" (J. SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU); Unjigi, a text describing the contemplation of Sanskrit syllables (S. BĪJA, J. shuji); Shojijissogi, a text outlining Kukai's theory of language in which all sounds and letters are themselves full embodiments of the dharmakāya's teachings; and his magnum opus, the HIMITSU MANDARA JuJuSHINRON, in which Kukai makes his case for recognizing Shingon mikkyo as the pinnacle of Buddhist wisdom. Kukai was an accomplished calligrapher, poet, engineer, and sculptor and is also said to have invented kana, the Japanese syllabary.
La Vallée Poussin, Louis de. (1869-1938). Pioneering Belgian scholar of Buddhism, who is considered the founder of the Franco-Belgian school of European Buddhist Studies and one of the foremost European scholars of Buddhism during the twentieth century. La Vallée Poussin studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese under SYLVAIN LÉVI at the Sorbonne in Paris and HENDRIK KERN at Leiden, before becoming a professor of comparative Greek and Latin grammar at the University of Ghent in 1895, where he taught for the next three decades. La Vallée Poussin became especially renowned for his multilingual approach to Buddhist materials, in which all available recensions of a text in the major canonical languages of the Buddhist tradition were carefully studied and compared. Indicative of this approach is La Vallée Poussin's massive French translation of VASUBANDHU's ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA (later translated into English in four volumes), which uses the Chinese recension (in an annotated Japanese edition) as the textus receptus but draws heavily on Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan materials in order to present a comprehensive, annotated translation of the text, placed squarely within the broader context of the SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA. La Vallée Poussin also published the first complete renderings in a Western language of DHARMAPĀLA/XUANZANG's CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi) and sĀNTIDEVA's BODHICARYĀVATĀRA. He also published editions, translations, and studies of central YOGĀCĀRA, MADHYAMAKA, and tantric texts, in addition to a number of significant topical studies, including one on the Buddhist councils (SAMGĪTI). In 1916, his Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, were published as The Way to Nirvāna: Six Lectures on Ancient Buddhism as a Discipline of Salvation. Of his many students, perhaps the most renowned was the Belgian ÉTIENNE LAMOTTE.
lecturing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Lecture
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu (1903-1994) ::: Orthodox scholar known for radio lectures on weekly Torah readings and on Maimonides.
Lévi, Sylvain. (1863-1935). Influential nineteenth-century European scholar of the YOGĀCĀRA school of Buddhism. Born in Paris to Alsatian parents, Lévi had a conservative Jewish education and held his first teaching position at a conservative seminary in Paris. Educated in Sanskrit at the University of Paris, Lévi became a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études in Paris in 1886. There, he taught Sanskrit until he became professor of Sanskrit language and literature at the Collège de France in 1894, a position that he would hold until 1935. Lévi went to India and Japan to carry out his research and also traveled extensively in Korea, Nepal, Vietnam, and Russia. He eventually became the director of the École des Hautes Études. In addition to Sanskrit, Lévi also read classical Chinese, Tibetan, and Kuchean and was one of the first Western scholars to study Indian Buddhism through translations that were extant only in those secondary canonical languages. Perhaps his most significant translations were of seminal texts of the YOGĀCĀRA school, including renderings of VASUBANDHU's twin synopses, the VIMsATIKĀ and TRIMsIKĀ (1925), and ASAnGA's MAHĀYĀNASuTRĀLAMKĀRA, thus introducing the major writings of this important Mahāyāna scholastic school to the Western scholarly world. Lévi also published on classical Indian theater, the history of Nepal, and Sanskrit manuscripts from Bali. Together with TAKAKUSU JUNJIRo, Lévi was the cofounder of the joint Japanese-French Hobogirin, an encyclopedic dictionary of Buddhism, the compilation of which continues to this day.
Liuzu tan jing. (J. Rokuso dangyo; K. Yukcho tan kyong 六祖壇經). In Chinese, "Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch," the written transcription of the sermons of the sixth patriarch (LIUZU) HUINENG (638-713); the composition is attributed to the monk FAHAI; also known as the Nan zong dunjiao zuishang dasheng mohe bore boluomi jing, Liuzu dashi fabao tan jing, Fabao tan jing, or simply Tan jing ("Platform Sutra"). The Liuzu tan jing is one of the most influential texts of the CHAN tradition. The text is ostensibly a record of the lectures delivered by the reputed sixth patriarch Huineng at the monastery of Dafansi in Shaozhou (present-day Guangdong province). The lectures contain the famous story of Huineng's verse competition with his rival SHENXIU, which wins Huineng the Chan patriarchy (see ZUSHI), in which Huineng distinguished his own "sudden teachings" (DUNJIAO) of a so-called Southern school (NAN ZONG) of Chan from the "gradual teachings" (jianjiao) of Shenxiu's Northern school (BEI ZONG). As Huineng defines the term later in this sermon, the "sudden teaching" involves an approach to Buddhist training that is free from all dualistic forms of practice (see ADVAYA) and that correspondingly rejects any and all expedient means (UPĀYA) of realizing truth. This sudden teaching comes to be considered emblematic of the so-called Southern school (Nan zong) of Chan, which retrospectively comes to be considered the mainstream of the Chan tradition. The teachings of the text also focus on the unity of concentration (SAMĀDHI) and wisdom (PRAJNĀ), in which concentration is conceived to be the essence (TI) of wisdom and wisdom the functioning (YONG) of concentration; "no-thought" (WUNIAN), which the text defines as "not to think even when involved in thought"; seeing one's own nature (JIANXING); and the conferral of the formless precepts (WUXIANG JIE). Indeed, the "platform" in the title refers to the ordination platform (jietan; cf. SĪMĀ) where Huineng conferred these formless precepts. Although the Liuzu tan jing has been traditionally heralded as the central scripture of the Nan zong, and certainly is beholden to the teachings of the Southern-school champion HEZE SHENHUI, the text seems to have been influenced as well by the teachings of both the Northern and Oxhead schools (NIUTOU ZONG). Within the Chan tradition, a Yuan-dynasty edition of the Liuzu tan jing, which included an important preface by FORI QISONG, was most widely disseminated. SIR MARC AUREL STEIN's rediscovery in the DUNHUANG manuscript cache of a previously unknown, and quite different, recension of the text, dating to the mid-ninth century, did much to launch the modern scholarly reappraisal of the received history of the Chan school. See also DUNWU.
lyceum ::: n. --> A place of exercise with covered walks, in the suburbs of Athens, where Aristotle taught philosophy.
A house or apartment appropriated to instruction by lectures or disquisitions.
A higher school, in Europe, which prepares youths for the university.
An association for debate and literary improvement.
Magoksa. (麻谷寺). In Korean, "Hemp Valley Monastery"; the sixth district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on T'aehwasan (Exalted Splendor Mountain) outside the city of Kongju in South Ch'ungch'ong province. The origins of the monastery and its name are obscure. One record claims that Magoksa was established by the Silla VINAYA master CHAJANG (fl. c. 590-658) in 643; because so many people attended Chajang's dharma lecture at the monastery's founding, the audience was said to have been "as dense as hemp stalks," so the Sinograph for "hemp" (ma) was given to the name of the monastery. This claim is, however, suspect since the monastery is located in what was then the territory of Silla's rival Paekche. A second theory is that the monastery was founded in 845 by Muju Muyom (799-888), founder of the Songjusan school of the Nine Mountains school of Son (KUSAN SoNMUN). When Muyom returned to Silla in 845 from his training in China, he is said to have named the monastery after his Chinese CHAN teacher Magu Baoche (K. Magok Poch'ol; b. 720?). Finally, it is also said that the monastery's name simply derives from the fact that hemp was grown in the valley before the monastery's establishment. In 1172, during the Koryo dynasty, Magoksa was significantly expanded in scope by POJO CHINUL (1158-1210) and his disciple Suu (d.u.), who turned it into a major monastery in the region. Following the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of 1592-1598, the monastery sat destroyed for some sixty years until several of its shrine halls were reconstructed by Kakch'ong (d.u.) in 1651 and the monastery returned to prominence. The Taegwang pojon (Basilica of Great Brightness) is Magoksa's central sanctuary and enshrines an image of the buddha VAIROCANA; the building was reconstructed in 1172 by Pojo Chinul and again in 1651. In front of the basilica is a juniper tree planted by the independence fighter Kim Ku (1876-1949), who later lived at the monastery as a monk. Magoksa's main buddha hall (taeung pojon; see TAEUNG CHoN) enshrines a sĀKYAMUNI Buddha statue that is flanked by AMITĀBHA and BHAIsAJYAGURU, and the calligraphy hanging outside this hall is reported to be that of Kim Saeng (711-790/791), one of Silla's most famous calligraphers. One of Magoksa's unique structures is its five-story, Koryo-era stone pagoda, which is built upon a two-story-high stone base; its bronze cap suggests Tibetan influences that may have entered Korea via the Mongol Yuan dynasty. It is one of only three STuPAs of similar style known to exist worldwide. The Yongsan chon (Vulture Peak Hall) is decorated with paintings of the eight stereotypical episodes in the life of the Buddha (p'alsang; see C. BAXIANG); it is also called the Ch'onbul chon, or Thousand Buddhas Hall, for the many buddha statues enshrined around the inside perimeter of the hall. The building, which was reconstructed by Kakch'ong in 1651, is today's Magoksa's oldest extant building, with a plaque that may display the calligraphy of King Sejo (r. 1455-1468).
Main works: The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 1885; The Spirit of Modem Philosophy, 1892; The World and the Indidvidual, 1900; Lectures on Modem Idealism, 1919. Rule, ethical or moral: Any general ethical proposition enjoining a certain kind of action in a certain kind of situation, e.g., one who has made a promise should keep it. Rules figure especially in "dogmatic" types of deontological or intuitionstic ethics, and teleological ethics is often described as emphasizing ends rather than rules. Even a teleologist may, however, recommend certain rules, such as the above, as describing kinds of action which are generally conducive to good ends. -- W.K.F.
Manam Chonghon. (曼庵宗憲) (1876-1957). Korean monk and educator during the Japanese occupation and postwar periods; also known as Mogyang. After losing his parents at an early age, Manam became a monk and studied under HANYoNG CHoNGHO (1870-1948). In 1900, he devoted himself to the study of SoN meditation at the monastery of Unmun Sonwon (UNMUNSA). In 1910, after Korea's annexation by Japan, Manam traveled throughout the southern regions of the peninsula and delivered lectures on Buddhism to the public until he settled down at the monastery of PAEGYANGSA in 1920 to serve as abbot. At a time when the Buddhist community was split over the issue of clerical marriage, Manam, for the first time, divided his monk-students between the celibate chongpop chung (proper-dharma congregation) and the married hobop chung (protecting-dharma congregation). Manam's actions were considered to be a formal recognition of clerical marriage and were heavily criticized by the rest of the Buddhist community led by YONGSoNG CHINJONG (1864-1940) and Namjon Kwangon (1868-1936). In 1945, the Koburhoe organization that Manam established clashed with the General Administrative Committee of the Choson Buddhist order over the issue of the laxity of Buddhist practice in Korea, with Manam arguing for a return to the strict and disciplined lifestyle of the past as a means of preventing the corruption of Buddhism. After the end of the Japanese occupation, Manam organized the Kobul Ch'ongnim gathering and initiated what later came to be called the "purification movement" (chonghwa undong) in Korean Buddhism. In 1952, he succeeded his teacher Hanyong and became head (kyojong) of the Choson Buddhist order. As head, he gave the order a new name, the "Chogye Order of Korean Buddhism" (Taehan Pulgyo Chogye Chong; see CHONGYE CHONG), and created a new entry in its constitution, formally delineating the distinction between married monks (kyohwasŭng) and celibate monks (suhaengsŭng). He attempted to initiate a new plan for the organization of monasteries that would give priority to the celibate monks, but his plan was never put into practice. When President Syngman Rhee showed his support for the purification movement in May 1954, the monks of the Chogye order held a national convention and appointed Manam, Tongsan Hyeil (1890-1965), and Ch'ongdam Sunho (1902-1971) as the new leaders of the order and initiated a nationwide Buddhist reformation movement. Manam, however, was ultimately unable to mediate the different opinions of the representatives of the Buddhist community concerning the specific details and goals of the purification movement.
microcentury ::: One CS professor used to characterise the standard length of his lectures as a microcentury - that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also attoparsec, nanoacre, and especially microfortnight).
microcentury One CS professor used to characterise the standard length of his lectures as a microcentury - that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also {attoparsec}, {nanoacre}, and especially {microfortnight}).
modal logic "logic" An extension of {propositional calculus} with {operators} that express various "modes" of truth. Examples of modes are: necessarily A, possibly A, probably A, it has always been true that A, it is permissible that A, it is believed that A. "It is necessarily true that A" means that things being as they are, A must be true, e.g. "It is necessarily true that x=x" is TRUE while "It is necessarily true that x=y" is FALSE even though "x=y" might be TRUE. Adding modal operators [F] and [P], meaning, respectively, henceforth and hitherto leads to a "{temporal logic}". Flavours of modal logics include: {Propositional Dynamic Logic} (PDL), {Propositional Linear Temporal Logic} (PLTL), {Linear Temporal Logic} (LTL), {Computational Tree Logic} (CTL), {Hennessy-Milner Logic}, S1-S5, T. C.I. Lewis, "A Survey of Symbolic Logic", 1918, initiated the modern analysis of modality. He developed the logical systems S1-S5. JCC McKinsey used algebraic methods ({Boolean algebras} with operators) to prove the decidability of Lewis' S2 and S4 in 1941. Saul Kripke developed the {relational semantics} for modal logics (1959, 1963). Vaughan Pratt introduced {dynamic logic} in 1976. Amir Pnuelli proposed the use of temporal logic to formalise the behaviour of continually operating {concurrent} programs in 1977. [Robert Goldblatt, "Logics of Time and Computation", CSLI Lecture Notes No. 7, Centre for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Second Edition, 1992, (distributed by University of Chicago Press)]. [Robert Goldblatt, "Mathematics of Modality", CSLI Lecture Notes No. 43, Centre for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 1993, (distributed by University of Chicago Press)]. [G.E. Hughes and M.J. Cresswell, "An Introduction to Modal Logic", Methuen, 1968]. [E.J. Lemmon (with Dana Scott), "An Introduction to Modal Logic", American Philosophical Quarterly Monograpph Series, no. 11 (ed. by Krister Segerberg), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977]. (1995-02-15)
modal logic ::: (logic) An extension of propositional calculus with operators that express various modes of truth. Examples of modes are: necessarily A, possibly A, probably A, it has always been true that A, it is permissible that A, it is believed that A.It is necessarily true that A means that things being as they are, A must be true, e.g. It is necessarily true that x=x is TRUE while It is necessarily true that x=y is FALSE even though x=y might be TRUE.Adding modal operators [F] and [P], meaning, respectively, henceforth and hitherto leads to a temporal logic.Flavours of modal logics include: Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL), Propositional Linear Temporal Logic (PLTL), Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), Computational Tree Logic (CTL), Hennessy-Milner Logic, S1-S5, T.C.I. Lewis, A Survey of Symbolic Logic, 1918, initiated the modern analysis of modality. He developed the logical systems S1-S5. JCC McKinsey used algebraic proposed the use of temporal logic to formalise the behaviour of continually operating concurrent programs in 1977.[Robert Goldblatt, Logics of Time and Computation, CSLI Lecture Notes No. 7, Centre for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Second Edition, 1992, (distributed by University of Chicago Press)].[Robert Goldblatt, Mathematics of Modality, CSLI Lecture Notes No. 43, Centre for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 1993, (distributed by University of Chicago Press)].[G.E. Hughes and M.J. Cresswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic, Methuen, 1968].[E.J. Lemmon (with Dana Scott), An Introduction to Modal Logic, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograpph Series, no. 11 (ed. by Krister Segerberg), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977]. (1995-02-15)
Mohe zhiguan. (J. Makashikan; K. Maha chigwan 摩訶止觀). In Chinese, "The Great Calming and Contemplation"; a comprehensive treatise on soteriological theory and meditation according to the TIANTAI ZONG; attributed to TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597). The Mohe zhiguan is based on a series of lectures Zhiyi delivered in 594, which were transcribed and edited by his disciple GUANDING. Zhi (lit. "stopping") is the Chinese translation for sAMATHA (calmness, serenity) and guan (lit. "observation") is the Chinese for VIPAsYANĀ (insight); the work as a whole seeks to establish a proper balance between meditative practice and philosophical insight. Zhi and guan practice are treated in three different ways in this treatise. Zhi in its denotation of "stopping" means calming the mind so that it is not buffeted by distracting thoughts; fixing the mind so that it stays focused on the present; and recognizing that distraction and concentration are both manifestations of a unitary, nondual reality. Guan in its denotation of "observation" means to illuminate the illusory nature of thought so that distractions are brought to an end; to have insight into the suchness (TATHATĀ) that is the ultimate nature of all phenomena in the universe; and to recognize that in suchness both insight and noninsight ultimately are identical. The original text of the Mohe zhiguan consists of ten chapters, but only the titles of the last three chapters survive. The last extant chapter, Chapter 7 on "Proper Contemplation," comprises approximately half of the entire treatise and, as the title suggests, provides a detailed description of the ten modes of contemplation and the ten spheres of contemplation. The first of the ten spheres of contemplation is called "the realm of the inconceivable" (S. ACINTYA). In his discussion of this realm in the first part of the fifth roll, Zhiyi covers one of the most famous of Tiantai doctrines: "the TRICHILIOCOSM in a single instant of thought" (YINIAN SANQIAN), which Zhiyi frames here as the "the trichiliocosm contained in the mind during an instant of thought" (sanqian zai yinian xin), viz., that any given thought-moment perfectly encompasses all reality, both temporally and spatially. By emphatically noting the "inconceivable" ability of the mind to contain the trichiliocosm, Zhiyi sought to emphasize the importance and mystery of the mind during the practice of meditation. This chapter, however, remains incomplete. The work also offers an influential presentation of the "four SAMĀDHIs," that is, the samādhis of constant sitting, constant walking, both sitting and walking, and neither sitting nor walking. Along with Zhiyi's FAHUA XUANYI and FAHUA WENJU, the Mohe zhiguan is considered to be one of the three most important treatises in the Tiantai tradition and is regarded as Zhiyi's magnum opus. The Tiantai monk ZHANRAN's MOHE ZHIGUAN FUXING ZHUANHONG JUE is considered to be the most authoritative commentary on the Mohe zhiguan.
More, Paul Elmer: An American literary critic and philosopher (1864-1937), who after teaching at Bryn Mawr and other colleges, edited The Nation for several years before retiring to lecture at Princeton University and write The Greek Tradition, a series of books in which he argues for orthodox Christianity on the basis of the Platonic dualism of mind-body, matter-spirit, God-man. In The Sceptical Approach to Religion he gave his final position, as ethical theism grounded on man's sense of the good and consciousness of purpose, and validated by the Incarnation of God in Christ. -- W.N.P.
Mukan Fumon. (無關普門) (1212-1291). Japanese proper name of RINZAISHu monk and first abbot of NANZENJI; also known as Gengo. Mukan was born in Hoshina in Shinano province (present-day Nagano prefecture) and received the BODHISATTVA precepts around 1230 at a monastery affiliated with MYoAN EISAI's (1141-1215) lineage. He became versed at Japanese exoteric and esoteric Buddhist teachings, and traveled around the eastern part of Japan, especially the Kanto and Tohoku regions, to lecture. Between 1243 and 1249, Mukan studied under ENNI BEN'EN (1202-1280). Mukan traveled to China in 1251, where he received transmission from Duanqiao Miaolun (1201-1261), the tenth-generation master in the YANGQI PAI collateral lineage of the LINJI ZONG, before returning to Japan in 1263. Mukan became the third abbot of Tohukuji in 1281 and was later appointed in 1291 by the cloistered Emperor Kameyama (r. 1260-1274) to be the founding abbot (J. kaisan; C. KAISHAN) of Nanzenji. There is a well-known story about his appointment as the Nazenji abbot. The monastery was originally built as a royal palace, but soon after the emperor moved there, ghosts began to haunt it. After several other monks failed to exorcise the ghosts, the emperor finally invited Mukan to try. Mukan succeeded in removing the ghosts by conducting Zen meditation with his disciples. In gratitude, the emperor turned the palace into a Rinzai monastery and appointed Mukan its abbot.
Müller, Friedrich Max. (1823-1900). Arguably the most famous Indologist of the nineteenth century, born in Dessau, the capital of the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, son of the famous Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller. He studied Sanskrit in Leipzig, receiving a doctorate in philology in 1843 at the age of twenty. In Berlin, he attended the lectures of Franz Bopp and Schelling. He went to Paris in 1846 where he studied with EUGÈNE BURNOUF, who suggested the project that would become his life's work, a critical edition of the Ṛgveda. In order to study the available manuscripts, he traveled to London and then settled in Oxford, where he would spend the rest of his life, eventually being appointed to a newly established professorship in comparative philology. Although best known for his work in philology, Indology, and comparative religion, Müller wrote essays and reviews on Buddhism throughout his career. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Buddhist studies came through his role as editor-in-chief of the Sacred Books of the East series, published between 1879 and 1910. Ten of the forty-nine volumes of the series were devoted to Buddhist works. Reflecting the opinion of the day that Pāli texts of the THERAVĀDA tradition represented the most accurate record of what the Buddha taught, seven of these volumes were devoted to Pāli works, with translations by THOMAS W. RHYS DAVIDS and HERMANN OLDENBERG, as well as a translation of the DHAMMAPADA by Müller himself. Among other Indian works, AsVAGHOsA's famous life of the Buddha appeared twice, translated in one volume from Sanskrit by E. B. Cowell and in another from Chinese by SAMUEL BEAL. HENDRIK KERN's translation of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") was included in another volume. The final volume of the series, entitled Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts (1894), included such famous works as the VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("Diamond Sutra"), the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA ("Heart Sutra"), and the three major PURE LAND sutras, all Indian works (or at least so regarded at the time) but selected because of their importance for Japanese Buddhism. Müller's choice of these texts was influenced by two Japanese students: TAKAKUSU JUNJIRo and NANJo BUN'Yu, both JoDO SHINSHu adherents who had gone to Oxford in order to study Indology with Müller. Upon their return, they introduced to Japanese academe the philological study of Buddhism from Sanskrit and Pāli sources. The works in Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts were translated by Müller, with the exception of the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING (*Amitāyurdhyānasutra), which was translated by Takakusu. In his final years, with financial support of the King of Siam, Müller began editing the Sacred Books of the Buddhists series, which was taken over by T. W. Rhys Davids upon Müller's death in 1900.
Muyong Suyon. (無用秀演) (1651-1719). Korean scholastic (KYO) monk of the Choson dynasty. Muyong lost both parents at the age of thirteen and lived with his elder brother, until he decided in 1669 to become a monk at the monastery of SONGGWANGSA. Three years later, he went to the monastery of SoNAMSA to continue his studies under Ch'imgoeng Hyonbyon (1616-1684). At Ch'imgoeng's recommendation, Muyong became a disciple of the eminent SoN master PAEGAM SoNGCH'ONG (1631-1700) at Songgwangsa. In 1680, Muyong held a public lecture at Sinsonam in the vicinity of Chinggwangsa. In order to accommodate the large number of people coming to his lectures, Muyong is said to have moved back to the larger monasteries of Sonamsa and Songgwangsa. Muyong at one point went into retreat to meditate, but he was forced to return to teaching at the request of all those people who wished to attend his lectures. He also assisted in Paegam's publication of Buddhist scriptures. After Paegam's death, he taught at the hermitage of Ch'ilburam. In 1719, when his disciple Yakt'an (1668-1754) organized a great assembly to study Hwaom (C. HUAYAN) doctrine and verse commentaries to the public cases (K. kongan; C. GONG'AN) of the Chan masters of old, Muyong was asked to preside. His essays, letters, and poems are collected in the Muyongdang chip.
namu Myohorengekyo. (C. namo Miaofa lianhua jing; K. namu Myobop yonhwa kyong 南無妙法蓮華經). In Japanese, lit. "Homage to the Lotus Flower of the Sublime Dharma Scripture," the phrase chanted as the primary practice of the various subtraditions of the NICHIRENSHu, including NICHIREN SHOSHu and SOKKA GAKKAI. The first syllable of the phrase, "namu," is a transcription of the Sanskrit term "namas," meaning "homage"; "Myohorengekyo" is the Japanese pronunciation of the title of KUMĀRAJĪVA's (344-413) Chinese translation of the influential SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). The phrase is also known in the Nichiren tradition as the DAIMOKU (lit. "title"). Chanting or meditating on the title of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra seems to have had a long history in the TENDAISHu (TIANTAI ZONG) in Japan. The practice was further developed and popularized by the Tendai monk NICHIREN, who placed this practice above all others. Relying on the FAHUA XUANYI, an important commentary on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra by the Chinese monk TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597), Nichiren claimed that the essence of the scripture is distilled in its title, or daimoku, and that chanting the title can therefore lead to the attainment of buddhahood in this very body (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU). He also drew on the notion that the dharma was then in decline (J. mappo; see C. MOFA) to promote the chanting of namu Myohorengekyo as the optimal approach to enlightenment in this degenerate age. The ONGI DUDEN ("Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings"), the transcription of Nichiren's lectures on the sutra compiled by his disciple Nichiko (1246-1332), gives a detailed exegesis of the meaning of the phrase. In the Nichiren interpretation, namu represents the dedication of one's whole life to the essential truth of Buddhism, which is the daimoku Myohorengekyo. Myoho refers to the "sublime dharma" of the nonduality of enlightenment and ignorance. Renge is the "lotus flower" (PUndARĪKA), which, because it is able to bear seeds and yet bloom at the same time, symbolizes the simultaneity of cause and effect. Finally, kyo represents the voices and sounds of all sentient beings, which affirm the universal presence of the buddha-nature (C. FOXING). The chanting of the phrase is therefore considered to be the ultimate means to attain buddhahood, regardless of whether or not one knows its meaning. In addition to its soteriological dimension, the chanting of the phrase is believed by some to convey such practical benefits as good health and financial well-being.
Nānatiloka Mahāthera. (1878-1957). A distinguished German THERAVĀDA monk and scholar. Born Anton Walter Florus Gueth in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1878, Nānatiloka studied music at conservatories in Frankfurt and Paris and became a violinist. As a child, he became interested in religion, and, after attending a lecture on Theosophy in Berlin in 1899, he decided to travel to Asia. Traveling as a violinist, he toured Turkey, Egypt, and India. From India, he went to Sri Lanka and then to Burma. In 1903 he took ordination as a Buddhist novice (P. sāmanera; S. sRĀMAnERA) in Rangoon (Yangon) from bhikkhu Ānanda Metteyya, apparently the first German ever to be ordained. In the following year he took higher ordination (UPASAMPADĀ) as a monk (P. bhikkhu; S. BHIKsU). After his ordination, Nānatiloka moved to Sri Lanka in 1905. He traveled to Europe in 1910-1911, the first of many international tours, staying mostly in Switzerland, where he conducted the first Buddhist novice ordination (P. pabbajjā; cf. S. PRAVRAJITA) on European soil. In 1911, he returned to Sri Lanka and made his hermitage on an island infested with poisonous snakes in the middle of Ratgama Lake in southwestern Sri Lanka. When he arrived at the hermitage site, he was the only human on the island. People in the nearby town of Dodanduwa brought him offerings by boat every day. Soon, many Europeans came to be ordained by Nānatiloka at what became known as Island Hermitage. He was interned by the British during World War I as an enemy alien. In 1916, he was given a passport to return to Germany via the United States. He traveled to Honolulu and then on to China but was arrested in Chungking (Chongqing) and imprisoned in Hankow (Hankou) until 1919, when he was exchanged by the International Red Cross and sent back to Germany. He was unable to return to Sri Lanka in 1920 and so went on to Japan, where he served as a professor at Komazawa University. In 1926, Nānatiloka was finally able to return to Sri Lanka. Nānatiloka was interned again with other German nationals (including his student NĀnAPONIKA) during the Second World War and returned again to Sri Lanka in 1946. He was later naturalized as a Sri Lankan citizen. He founded the International Buddhist Union with LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA, another student, to whom he gave his Buddhist name. Nānatiloka was viewed by the Sinhalese as a great religious practitioner; upon Nānatiloka's death in 1957, he received a cremation ceremony of the highest honor in Independence Square, with both the prime minister of Sri Lanka and the German ambassador attending. He published his most famous work, The Word of the Buddha, in 1906, as well as articles and books in both English and German, including Buddhist Dictionary, Guide through the Abhidhamma-Pitaka, and Path to Deliverance.
nanocomputer "architecture" /nan'oh-k*m-pyoo'tr/ A computer with molecular-sized switching elements. Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for their logic have been proposed. The controller for a {nanobot} would be a nanocomputer. Some nanocomputers can also be called {quantum computers} because quantum physics plays a major role in calculations. {Richard P. Feynman} is still cited today for his work in this area. ["Feynman Lectures on Computation", Richard P. Feynman (Editor, Author), Robin W. Allen (Editor), Tony Hey (Author)] [{Jargon File}] (2008-01-14)
Niutou Farong. (J. Gozu Hoyu; K. Udu Pobyung 牛頭法融) (594-657). In Chinese, "Oxhead, Dharma Interfusion"; proper name of the founder of an early CHAN school often known in English as the "Oxhead school" (NIUTOU ZONG), after his toponym Niutou (Oxhead). Farong was a native of Yanling in present-day Jiangsu province. Little is known of his early years. He is said to have studied the teachings of MADHYAMAKA and to have spent twenty years in the mountains after his ordination by a certain dharma master Ling (d.u.). In 643, Farong entered the monastery of Youqisi on Mt. Niutou (in present-day Jiangsu province), whence he acquired his toponym. In 647, he gave a public lecture on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, and six years later he lectured on the PANCAVIMsATISĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA at the monastery of Jianchusi (see BAO'ENSI). The influential treatise JUEGUAN LUN ("Extinguishing Cognition Treatise") is attributed by tradition to BODHIDHARMA, the legendary founder of the Chan school, but it is now generally believed to have been composed by Farong or one of his students. Although Farong's official biography in the XU GAOSENG ZHUAN does not mention this event, later stele inscriptions and Chan genealogical histories (see CHUANDENG LU) report that DAOXIN, the putative fourth patriarch of the Chan school, instructed Farong in the sudden teaching (DUNJIAO); Farong's connections with Daoxin are, however, historically dubious. Some of the more unusual positions Farong took include the notion that even inanimate objects, such as rocks, rivers, and flowers, possess the buddha-nature (FOXING). Farong was also one of the earliest teachers in the Chan school to advocate the nonreliance on conceptual descriptions of Buddhism (see BULI WENZI).
Obermiller, Eugène. (1901-1935). Noted Russian scholar of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, born in St. Petersburg to a family devoted to music and the arts. He studied English, French, and German as a youth and was planning to become a musician. However, when he was eighteen years of age, he was stricken by syringomyelia, a disease of the spinal cord, which deprived him of the full use of his hands and fingers. After the Russian Revolution, he attended FYODOR IPPOLITOVICH STCHERBATSKY's lectures on Sanskrit at the University of Petrograd (later Leningrad and St. Petersburg) and studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mongolian. He became Stcherbatsky's student, preparing Sanskrit-Tibetan and Tibetan-Sanskrit indexes to the NYĀYABINDU and assisting him in editing the Tibetan text of the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA. Obermiller spent a great deal of time in Buryatia in the Transbaikal, studying at Mongolian monasteries of the DGE LUGS PA tradition, where he learned to speak Tibetan. In working closely with learned Buddhist monks, Obermiller anticipated what would become a common model of scholarship after the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959. In 1928, Stcherbatsky formed the Institute of Buddhist Culture (later to become part of the Institute of Oriental Studies), and Obermiller was appointed as a research scholar. In 1929, the two colleagues published an edition of the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA. Obermiller continued to suffer from syringomyelia throughout this period. By the age of thirty, he had become incapacitated to the point that he was not able to write and died four years later. Despite his debilitating illness, during his last years, he remained committed to his scholarship and published a number of pioneering translations, including BU STON's "History of Buddhism" (BU STON CHOS 'BYUNG) and the RATNAGOTRAVIBHĀGA (Uttaratantra) in 1932. In his articles (several of which have been republished), he focused especially on the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ exegetical literature, relying largely on Dge lugs expositions.
Ongi kuden. (御義口傳). In Japanese, "Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings"; transcription of the lectures on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") by NICHIREN, compiled by his disciple Nichiko (1246-1333). See NAMU MYoHoRENGEKYo.
oration ::: n. --> An elaborate discourse, delivered in public, treating an important subject in a formal and dignified manner; especially, a discourse having reference to some special occasion, as a funeral, an anniversary, a celebration, or the like; -- distinguished from an argument in court, a popular harangue, a sermon, a lecture, etc.; as, Webster&
Paegam Songch'ong. (栢庵性聰) (1631-1700). Korean scholar-monk and poet from the mid-Choson dynasty. Born in 1631, he entered the SAMGHA in 1645, at the age of sixteen, and received the precepts from the monk Ch'wiam (d.u.). He went to Mt. Pangjang (present-day CHIRISAN) and became a disciple of the eminent Son master Ch'wimi Such'o (1590-1668). In 1660, Songch'ong became a lecturer and subsequently traveled from one monastery to the next, including SONGGWANGSA, Chinggwangsa, and SSANGGYESA. He was also a renowned poet and is known to have befriended many famous poets of his time. In 1681, a boat containing more than 190 Buddhist texts, including the Daming Fashu, Huixuan ji, Sidashisuo lu, and Jingtubao shu, was found adrift near Imja Island. Songch'ong was able to acquire these texts, and for the next fifteen years he made over five thousand copies of them. He passed away in 1700, while residing at the hermitage of Sinhŭngam in Ssanggyesa. Songch'ong was also a prolific writer and left many works, including his Ch'imun chip chu ("Commentary on the ZIMEN JINGXUN"), Chongt'oboso, Paegam chip, and Chihom ki.
Pak Chungbin. (朴重彬) (1891-1943). Founder of the Korean new religion of WoNBULGYO; also known by his cognomen SOT'AESAN. He is said to have begun his quest to discover the fundamental principle of the universe and human life at the age of seven and continued ascetic training for about twenty years. Finally, in 1916 at the age of twenty-six, Sot'aesan is said to have attained a personal enlightenment, which is considered the founding year of his religion. Since Sot'aesan recognized compelling parallels between his own experience and the description of enlightenment in Buddhism, he first called his religious organization the Pulpop Yon'guhoe (Society for the Study of the BUDDHADHARMA); later, the religion adopted the formal name of Wonbulgyo (lit. Consummate Buddhism). He presented his enlightenment, which he symbolized with the "one circle image" (IRWoNSANG), as the criterion of religious belief and practice by proclaiming the "cardinal tenet of one circle" (irwon chongji). Along with organizing his religion's fundamental tenets and building its institutional base, he and his followers also worked to improve the ordinary life of his followers, by establishing thrift and savings institutions and engaging in farming and land reclamation projects. The three foundational religious activities of edification (kyohwa), education (kyoyuk), and public service (chason) continue to be emblematic of Wonbulgyo practice. Sot'aesan published in 1943 the Wonbulgyo chongjon ("Principal Book of Won Buddhism"), a primer of the basic tenets of Wonbulgyo, which is one of the two representative scriptures of the religion, along with the Taejonggyong ("Discourses of the Founding Master"), the dialogues and teachings of Sot'aesan, published in 1962 by his successor Chongsan Song Kyu (1900-1962). Sot'aesan died in 1943 at the age of fifty-three, after delivering his last lecture, entitled "The Truth of Birth and Death" (Saengsa ŭi chilli).
Peripatetics [from Greek peri about + patein to pace, walk] The followers of Aristotle (384-322 BC), either because he paced up and down when he lectured as commonly supposed, or from the peripatos or covered walk of the Lyceum. The chief representatives of the school are Theophrastus of Lesbos (372-287 BC), who with Eudemus of Rhodes, Aristoxemus of Tarentum, and Dicaearchus of Messene, were the personal disciples of Aristotle; Strato of Lampsacus (succeeded Theophrastus 288 BC); Andronicus of Rhodes (head of the school at Rome 58 BC); Alexander of Aphrodisias (commentator of Aristotle, 2nd and 3rd century AD).
Phap Loa. (法螺) (1284-1330). In Vietnamese, "Dharma Conch"; the second patriarch of the TRÚC LM school of Vietnamese Buddhism. His personal name was Đồng Kien Cương and was a native of Nam Sach (in northern Vietnam). He met TRẦN NHN TÔNG for the first time in 1304 and became his disciple. He received full ordination from Tràn Nhan Tông in 1305 and was given the dharma name Phap Loa. In 1308, he was officially recognized as the second patriarch of the Trúc Lam School. Buddhism prospered under his leadership. In support of Tràn Nhan Tông's goal of a unified SAMGHA, Phap Loa established in 1313 a national monastic hierarchy, according to which all monks had to register and were under his jurisdiction. Every three years, he would organize a collective ordination ceremony. He also oversaw the construction of many monasteries. By 1314, some thirty-three monasteries had been built, several with large libraries. He was also a tireless teacher, who gave frequent lectures on Chan texts and Buddhist scriptures. This was a period when many aristocrats either entered the monastic order or received precepts as lay practitioners and donated vast tracts of land to Buddhist temples. Among his disciples were the kings Tràn Anh Tông and Tràn Minh Tông. In 1311, he oversaw the printing of the complete canon and other Buddhist manuals. He also composed several works, most now lost, including commentaries on several MAHĀYĀNA sutras.
Phenomenology: Since the middle of the Eighteenth Century, "Phänomenologie," like its English equivalent, has been a name for several disciplines, an expression for various concepts. Lambert, in his Neue Organon (1764), attached the name "Phänomenologie" to the theory of the appearances fundamental to all empirical knowledge. Kant adopted the word to express a similar though more restricted sense in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786). On the other hand, in Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) the same word expresses a radically different concept. A precise counterpart of Hegel's title was employed by Hamilton to express yet another meaning. In "The Divisions of Philosophy" (Lectures on Metaphysics, 1858), after stating that "Philosophy properly so called" is "conversant about Mind," he went on to say: "If we consider the mind merely with the view of observing and generalizing the various phaenomena it reveals, . . . we have . . . one department of mental science, and this we may call the Phaenomenology of Mind." Similarly Moritz Lazarus, in his Leben der Seele (1856-57), distinguished Phänomenologie from Psychologie: The former describes the phenomena of mental life; the latter seeks their causal explanation.
pravāranā. (P. pavāranā; T. dgag phye; C. zizi; J. jishi; K. chaja 自恣). In Sanskrit, "invitation" or "presentation," the monastic ceremony that marks the end of the annual rains retreat (VARsĀ). (The Tibetan translation denotes the "separation from prohibition" that accompanies the end of the rains retreat; the Chinese translation zizi has the connotation of "self-indulgence," suggesting that monks are then free to "follow their own bent.") The purity of the SAMGHA is reaffirmed by each monk by asking the community whether he committed any infraction of the code of discipline (PRĀTIMOKsA) during the period of the retreat. In the Southeast Asian traditions, the ceremony is held at the end of the rains retreat (varsā) on the full-moon day of the seventh or eighth lunar month (usually between September and November), at which time each monk resident at a monastery invites the monastic community to point out any wrongs he may have committed that were either seen, heard, or suspected. The pravāranā must be performed at a single site by all eligible members of a given saMgha, although if a monk is ill, he may dispatch his invitation through an intermediary. A monk guilty of an offense that has not been expiated may not participate. According to VINAYA strictures, the pravāranā ceremony may not be performed in the presence of the following kinds of persons: nuns, women in training to become nuns, male and female novices, persons who have seceded from the order, monastics guilty of a PĀRĀJIKA offense, monks who refuse to acknowledge their own wrongdoing (of three kinds), eunuchs, false monks who wear monastic attire without having been ordained, monks who have joined other religions, nonhumans, patricides, matricides, murderers of an ARHAT, seducers of nuns, schismatics, those who have shed the blood of a buddha, hermaphrodites, and laypersons. Traditionally on the pravāranā day, laypeople would come to the monastery and make offerings of necessary requisites to the monks throughout the day on behalf of their parents and deceased ancestors. The Chinese pilgrim YIJING (635-713) in his NANHAI JIGUI NEIFA ZHUAN describes pravāranā as an elaborate communal festival, with senior monks delivering protracted dharma lectures throughout the day and night; lamps were lit and flowers and incense offered as laypeople distributed gifts to the entire saMgha.
prelection ::: n. --> A lecture or discourse read in public or to a select company.
prelector ::: n. --> A reader of lectures or discourses; a lecturer.
prelect ::: v. t. --> To read publicly, as a lecture or discourse. ::: v. i. --> To discourse publicly; to lecture.
professor ::: n. --> One who professed, or makes open declaration of, his sentiments or opinions; especially, one who makes a public avowal of his belief in the Scriptures and his faith in Christ, and thus unites himself to the visible church.
One who professed, or publicly teaches, any science or branch of learning; especially, an officer in a university, college, or other seminary, whose business it is to read lectures, or instruct students, in a particular branch of learning; as a professor of
Pulguksa. (佛國寺). In Korean, "Buddha Land Monastery," located outside KYoNGJU, the ancient capital of the Silla dynasty, on the slopes of T'oham Mountain; this Silla royal monastery is the eleventh district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism and administers over sixty subsidiary monasteries and hermitages. According to the SAMGUK YUSA ("Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms"), Pulguksa was constructed in 751 by Kim Taesong (700-774), chief minister of King Kyongdok (r. 742-765), and completed in 774; it may have been constructed on the site of a smaller temple that dated from c. 528, during the reign of the Silla King Pophŭng (r. 514-539). Although it was a large complex, Pulguksa was not as influential within the Silla Buddhist tradition as other Kyongju monasteries, such as HWANGNYONGSA and PUNHWANGSA. The monastery has since been renovated numerous times, one of the largest projects occurring at the beginning of the seventeenth century, after the monastery was burned during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of 1592-1598. Pulguksa's temple complex is built on a series of artificial terraces that were constructed out of giant stone blocks and is entered via two pairs of stone "bridges" cum staircases, which are Korean national treasures in their own right and frequently photographed. The main level of the monastery centers on two courtyards: one anchored by the TAEUNG CHoN, or the main shrine hall, which houses a statue of sĀKYAMUNI Buddha, the other by the kŭngnak chon, or hall of ultimate bliss (SUKHĀVATĪ), which houses an eighth-century bronze statue of the buddha AMITĀBHA. The taeung chon courtyard is graced with two stone pagodas, the Sokka t'ap (sākyamuni STuPA) and the Tabo t'ap (Prabhutaratna stupa), which are so famous that the second of them is depicted on the Korean ten-won coin. The juxtaposition of the two stupas derives from the climax of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), where the buddha PRABHuTARATNA (Many Treasures) invites sākyamuni to sit beside him inside his bejeweled stupa, thus validating the teachings sākyamuni delivered in the scripture. The Sokka t'ap represents sākyamuni's solitary quest for enlightenment; it is three stories tall and is notable for its bare simplicity. This stupa is in marked contrast to its ornate twin, the Tabo t'ap, or Pagoda of the buddha Prabhutaratna, which is modeled after a reliquary and has elaborate staircases, parapets, and stone lions (one of which was removed to the British Museum). During a 1966 renovation of the Sokka t'ap, the world's oldest printed document was discovered sealed inside the stupa: the MUGUJoNGGWANG TAEDARANI KYoNG (S. Rasmivimalavisuddhaprabhādhāranī; "Great DHĀRAnĪ of Immaculate Radiance"). The terminus ad quem for the printing of the Dhāranī is 751 CE, when the text was sealed inside the Sokka t'ap, but it may have been printed even earlier. Other important buildings include the Piro chon (VAIROCANA Hall) that enshrines an eighth-century bronze statue of its eponymous buddha, which is presumed to be the oldest bronze image in Korea; the Musol chon (The Wordless Hall), a lecture hall located directly behind the taeung chon, which was built around 670; and the Kwanŭm chon (AVALOKITEsVARA hall), built at the highest point of the complex. Two and a half miles (4 kms) up T'oham Mountain to the east of Pulguksa is its affiliated SoKKURAM grotto temple. Pulguksa and Sokkuram were jointly listed in 1995 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Qur'an, Koran ::: lit., lecture or recitation; revelation from Allah to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) over a period of 23 years and compiled into a volume of 114 suras, or chapters
reader ::: n. --> One who reads.
One whose distinctive office is to read prayers in a church.
One who reads lectures on scientific subjects.
A proof reader.
One who reads manuscripts offered for publication and advises regarding their merit.
One who reads much; one who is studious.
Rhys Davids, Caroline Augusta Foley. (1857-1942). A prominent scholar of Pāli Buddhism and wife of THOMAS WILLIAM RHYS DAVIDS. Caroline Augusta Foley attended University College in London, where she studied Pāli language and literature. She later became a fellow at University College and worked as a Pāli reader at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Known to be a brilliant Pāli scholar and teacher, Rhys Davids had many dedicated students when she lectured in Indian philosophy at Manchester University. In 1894, at the age of thirty-six, she married T. W. Rhys Davids. They had three children together. In 1922, Rhys Davids became the president of the PĀLI TEXT SOCIETY, which had been founded by her husband, and served as president for twenty years. Rhys Davids published more than twenty-five monographs and translations. Two of her most famous books are Gotama the Man and Sakya or Buddhist Origins.
Rhys Davids, Thomas William. (1843-1922). Preeminent British scholar of Pāli Buddhism, Thomas William Rhys Davids was born in Colchester, the son of a Congregationalist minister. He attended secondary school in Brighton and then went on to the University of Breslau in Germany, where he studied Sanskrit. He received a PhD from the University of Breslau before taking a position as a judge in the Ceylon Civil Service in 1864. He resigned from this position in 1872 and became a lawyer in 1877. Instead of practicing law, Rhys Davids turned to researching and writing about Pāli literature. His first book, The Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon, was published in 1877, after which he began to publish regularly in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1880, he translated the NIDĀNAKATHĀ. His 1881 Hibbert Lectures became quite famous, and at the second lecture, Rhys Davids announced the creation of the PALI TEXT SOCIETY. the first learned society in the West to focus on Pāli language and literature. In 1882, Rhys Davids became a professor of Pāli at University College, London. From 1885 to 1904, he also worked for the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1904, he became professor of comparative religion at Victoria University, Manchester. In 1894, Rhys Davids married Caroline August Foley (see RHYS DAVIDS, CAROLINE AUGUST FOLEY); the two worked and published together for the rest of their lives. Rhys Davids published many works, including a Manual of Buddhism, the first two volumes of the "Sacred Books of the Buddhists" series, and the first volume of a Pāli-English Dictionary. The Rhys Davidses together translated the DĪGHANIKĀYA between 1910 and 1921.
rohatsu sesshin. (臘八攝心). In Japanese, lit. "retreat on the eighth [day] of the last [month]," typically refering to an intensive week-long session of meditation (SESSHIN) that ends on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month (rohatsu), the reputed day of the Buddha's enlightenment according to the East Asian calendar. The retreat begins with a ceremony on the first of the twelfth lunar month and ends on the morning of the eighth with another ceremony, which usually consists of a lecture by the abbot known as the rohatu jodo, and offerings made to an image of sĀKYAMUNI emerging from the mountains (shussan Shaka). (Cf. PRĀGBODHI[GIRI].) The rohatsu sesshin performed in the SAMGHA hall (SENGTANG) at ZEN monasteries often entails nonstop meditative practice with little or no sleep. See also YONGMAENG CHoNGJIN.
Rule of inference: See logic, formal, §§ 1, 3, and logistic system. Russell, Bertrand A. W.: (1872-) Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge, 1895; lecturer in philosophy, University of Cambridge, 1910-1916. Author of: The Philosophy of Leibniz, 1900; The Principles of Mathematics, 1903; Principia Mathematica (in collaboration with A. N. Whitehead), 3 vols. 1910-13, (second edition, 1925-27); The Problems of Philosophy, 1912; Our Knowledge of the External World, 1914; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 1918; The Analysis of Mind, 1921; The Analysis of Matter, 1927; An Outline of Philosophy, 1928; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940. Also numerous other works on philosophy, politics and education, outrageously attacked by reactionaries.
Ryoben. [alt. Roben] (良辨) (689-773). Founder of the Japanese Kegonshu (C. HUAYAN ZONG) during the Nara period (710-784) and the first abbot of ToDAIJI, the major Kegon monastery and the headquarters of the KOKUBUNJI network of provincial temples. Ryoben originally studied the teachings of the Hosso (C. FAXIANG) school under Gien (d. 728) and resided at the monastery of Konshuji. Under the patronage of the emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), Todaiji and its network of provincial temples was completed and the colossal NARA DAIBUTSU consecrated in 752; Ryoben was appointed the monastery's first abbot and he formally established the Kegon school at the site. The Kegon school, one of the six major scholastic traditions of Nara Buddhism (see NARA BUDDHISM, SIX SCHOOLS OF), is said to date from 740, when Ryoben invited the Korean monk SIMSANG (J. Shinjo, d. c. 744), a disciple of FAZANG (643-712), to Konshoji to lecture on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA to Emperor Shomu. Simsang is therefore typically considered the first patriarch of the Kegon school and Ryoben the second.
Saddhatissa, Hammalawa. (1914-1990). A prolific Pāli scholar, translator, social activist, and senior Buddhist monk. Born at Hammalawa in Satkorale province, Sri Lanka, he was ordained a BHIKsU in 1926 and pursued his undergraduate studies in Sri Lanka at Vidyodaya Pirivena and Prachina Bhasopakara Samagama. He continued his studies in Benares in India, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and ultimately received his Ph.D. at Edinburgh in 1965. He was proficient in Pāli, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Sinhala, and Hindi and held numerous academic posts in Asia, Europe, and North America, including Professor of Pāli at Banaras Hindu University from 1956 to 1957, Lecturer in Sinhala at SOAS from 1958 to 1960, Professor of Buddhism and Pāli at the University of Toronto from 1966 to 1969, and Visiting Lecturer at Oxford in 1973. While holding these posts, he also conducted numerous lecture tours in Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1956, he served as an advisor to Dr. BHIMRAO RAMJI AMBEDKAR (1891-1956) at Nagpur, India, during the organization of mass conversions of members of the Dalit caste (the so-called untouchables) to Buddhism. Between 1957 and 1985 he served as head of London Buddhist Vihara, and in 1966 revived the British MAHĀBODHI SOCIETY, which had been defunct since World War II, serving as its president. He also helped found the New London Buddhist Vihara in 1964; the Buddhist Center, Oakenholt, in Oxford in 1971; the Buddhist Research Library, in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka in 1984; and the Buddha Vihara, Handsworth, in Birmingham in 1986. He was appointed president of the Sangha Council of Great Britain in 1966, and the Sanghanayaka Thera of the United Kingdom in 1980. In 1984 he served as vice-president of the Pali Text Society. His English publications and critical editions and translations include The Buddha's Way, Buddhist Ethics, The Birth-Stories of the Ten Bodhisattas and the Dasabodhisattuppattikathā, Sutta Nipāta, Upāsakajanālankāra, Handbook for Buddhists, Introduction to Buddhism, and The Life of the Buddha.
Saicho. (最澄) (767-822). In Japanese, "Most Pure"; the monk traditionally recognized as the founder of the TENDAISHu in Japan; also known as Dengyo Daishi (Great Master Transmission of the Teachings). Although the exact dates and place of Saicho's birth remain a matter of debate, he is said to have been born to an immigrant Chinese family in omi province east of HIEIZAN in 767. At age eleven, Saicho entered the local Kokubunji and studied under the monk Gyohyo (722-797), a disciple of the émigré Chinese monk Daoxuan (702-766). In 785, Saicho received the full monastic precepts at the monastery of ToDAIJI in Nara, after which he began a solitary retreat in a hermitage on Mt. Hiei. In 788, he built a permanent temple on the summit of Mt. Hiei. After Emperor Kanmu (r. 781-806) moved the capital to Kyoto in 794, the political significance of the Mt. Hiei community and thus Saicho seem to have attracted the attention of the emperor. In 797, Saicho was appointed a court priest (naigubu), and in 802 he was invited to the monastery of Takaosanji to participate in a lecture retreat, where he discussed the writings of the eminent Chinese monk TIANTAI ZHIYI on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. Saicho and his disciple GISHIN received permission to travel to China in order to acquire Tiantai texts. In 804, they went to the monastery or Guoqingsi on Mt. Tiantai and studied under Daosui (d.u.) and Xingman (d.u.), disciples of the eminent Chinese Tiantai monk JINGQI ZHANRAN. Later, they are also known to have received BODHISATTVA precepts (bosatsukai) from Daosui at Longxingsi. He is also said to have received tantric initiation into the KONGoKAI and TAIZoKAI (RYoBU) MAndALAs from Shunxiao (d.u.). After nine and a half months in China, Saicho returned to Japan the next year with numerous texts, which he catalogued in his Esshuroku. Emperor Kanmu, who had been ill, asked Saicho to perform the esoteric rituals that he had brought back from China as a therapeutic measure. Saicho received permission to establish the Tendai sect and successfully petitioned for two Tendai monks to be ordained each year, one for doctrinal study and one to perform esoteric rituals. After the death of Kanmu in 806, little is known of Saicho's activities. In 810, he delivered a series of lectures at Mt. Hiei on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, the SUVARnAPRABHĀSOTTAMASuTRA, and the RENWANG JING ("Scripture for Humane Kings"). In 812, Saicho also constructed a meditation hall known as the Hokkezanmaido. Later, Saicho is also said to have received kongokai initiation from KuKAI at the latter's temple Takaosanji, but their relations soured after a close disciple of Saicho's left Saicho for Kukai. Their already tenuous relationship was sundered completely when Saicho requested a tantric initiation from Kukai, who replied that Saicho would need to study for three years with Kukai first. Saicho then engaged the eminent Hossoshu (FAXIANG ZONG) monk Tokuitsu (d.u.) in a prolonged debate concerning the buddha-nature (see BUDDHADHĀTU, FOXING) and Tendai doctrines, such as original enlightenment (see HONGAKU). In response to Tokuitsu's treatises Busshosho and Chuhengikyo, Saicho composed his Shogonjikkyo, Hokke kowaku, and Shugo kokkaisho. Also at this time, Saicho began a prolonged campaign to have an independent MAHĀYĀNA ordination platform established at Mt. Hiei. He argued that the bodhisattva precepts as set forth in the FANWANG JING, traditionally seen as complementary to monastic ordination, should instead replace them. He argued that the Japanese were spiritually mature and therefore could dispense entirely with the HĪNAYĀNA monastic precepts and only take the Mahāyāna bodhisattva precepts. His petitions were repeatedly denied, but permission to establish the Mahāyāna ordination platform at Mt. Hiei was granted a week after his death. Before his death Saicho also composed the Hokke shuku and appointed Gishin as his successor.
scrappy ::: a. --> Consisting of scraps; fragmentary; lacking unity or consistency; as, a scrappy lecture.
Sengyou. (J. Soyu; K. Sŭngu 僧祐) (445-518). Early Chinese VINAYA teacher and scriptural cataloguer, whose career is indicative of early Chinese Buddhism's concerns to preserve the integrity of the dispensation and to transmit its beliefs and practices accurately. According to his biography in the GAOSENG ZHUAN ("Biographies of Eminent Monks"), Sengyou was born in Jianye (present-day Nanjing, Jiangsu province), the capital of the Liu-Song dynasty (420-479), the first of the four short-lived southern dynasties that formed during the Six Dynasties period. He became a monk at an early age, and studied under vinaya master Faying (416-482). Later, Sengyou himself gained a reputation as a vinaya master; the Gaoseng zhuan says that, whenever he was invited by the prince Wenxuan (406-494) of the Qi dynasty (479-502) to lecture on the vinaya, typically seven or eight hundred people would attend. During the Yongming era (483-493) of the Qi dynasty, Sengyou received an imperial order to travel to the Wu region (in present-day Jiangnan) to lecture on the Shisong lü, the SARVĀSTIVĀDAVINAYA, as well as to explain the methods for receiving the precepts. In addition to his vinaya-related activities, Sengyou also tried to establish an authoritative canon of Buddhist texts by compiling the CHU SANZANG JIJI ("Compilation of Notices on the Translation of the TRIPItAKA"), the earliest extant Buddhist scriptural catalogue (JINGLU). In his catalogue, Sengyou introduced three criteria for distinguishing an apocryphal scripture (see APOCRYPHA) from a genuine one: (1) the meanings and expressions found in a text were "shallow and coarse"; (2) a text did not come from "foreign regions"; (3) a text was not translated by a "Western guest." While the first criterion was a more subjective form of internal evidence, the latter two were important pieces of external evidence that all subsequent cataloguers adopted as objective standards for determining textual authenticity. Sengyou's other extant major works include the Shijia pu ("Genealogy of sĀKYAMUNI"), in five rolls, and the Buddhist apologetic HONGMING JI ("Collection for the Propagation and Clarification [of Buddhism]"), in fourteen rolls.
sententiary ::: n. --> One who read lectures, or commented, on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Bishop of Paris (1159-1160), a school divine.
sermon ::: n. --> A discourse or address; a talk; a writing; as, the sermons of Chaucer.
Specifically, a discourse delivered in public, usually by a clergyman, for the purpose of religious instruction and grounded on some text or passage of Scripture.
Hence, a serious address; a lecture on one&
Shaku Soen. (釋宗演) (1859-1919). Influential early ZEN figure in the West. Ordained as a novice in the RINZAISHu at the age of twelve, Shaku Soen studied under the Rinzai master Imakita Kosen (1816-1892). Shaku Soen trained under Kosen at the famous ENGAKUJI monastery in Kamakura, receiving dharma transmission, and the authority to teach, at the age of twenty-four. He attended Keio University and then traveled to Ceylon to study Pāli and live as a THERAVĀDA monk. Upon his return, he became chief abbot of Engakuji in 1892. He gave instruction in Zen meditation to laymen and laywomen, both in Kamakura and Tokyo. One of his most influential students was DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI. In 1893, Shaku Soen was chosen to represent the Zen tradition at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. While in the United States, he met PAUL CARUS, and later arranged for D. T. Suzuki to work with Carus in LaSalle, Illinois. He served as Buddhist chaplain to the Japanese First Army Division after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. He later lectured on Zen in Europe, America, India, and Ceylon. He spent the remainder of his life lecturing extensively on Zen to lay audiences. He served as president of Rinzai College of Hanazono University in Kyoto from 1914 to 1917, before returning as abbot of Engakuji. His 1906 Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot was the first book on Zen to appear in English.
shangtang. (J. jodo; K. sangdang 上堂). In Chinese, lit. "ascending the hall"; a public lecture or sermon delivered by a CHAN, SoN, or ZEN master at the dharma hall. The master, often the abbot of the monastery, would typically ascend the dais in the dharma hall to deliver his sermon, hence the term shangtang, or "ascending the hall." The dharma hall of a Chan monastery typically did not house any icons, for the master himself was considered a living buddha while he was preaching on the dais. These shangtang lectures came to be carefully recorded by the disciples of the master and were typically edited together with other minor sermons like the xiaocan into the "recorded sayings" (YULU) of the master. By the medieval period, shangtang became more formalized, taking place at regular intervals; thus there are several specific types of shangtang described in the literature. Those that occurred on a bi-monthly basis were called danwang shangtang, since the sermons were given on the first (dan) and the fifteenth (wang) of each lunar month. Those that took place on the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth of each lunar month were called wucan shangtang, because there were a total of five assemblies (wucan) each month. Those held once every three days were called jiucan shangtang, because there were approximately nine such assemblies (jiucan) each lunar month. Shangtang that occurred on the birthday of the reigning emperor were called shengjie (occasion of His Majesty) shangtang, while those that took place as funerary memorials and deliverance rituals for a recently deceased emperor were called daxing zhuiyan shangtang. Shangtang that occurred after the abbot of the monastery had returned from a begging round were called chudui (troupe on a mission) shangtang. Those that took place to resolve an ongoing issue in the monastic community, such as quarrels, disputes, or other emergencies, were called yinshi shangtang (ascending the hall due to an exigency). Those that occurred to honor monastery staff overseeing internal affairs were called xie bingfu shangtang, while shangtang to honor monastery staff overseeing external and financial affairs were called xie dusizhai shangtang.
shichido garan. (七堂伽藍). In Japanese, "seven-halled temple"; an early Japanese monastic layout consisting of seven main structures (shichido). The oldest extant example of this layout in Japan can be seen in the Kudara (viz., the Korean Paekche) layout at HoRYuJI. The seven halls of the monasteries built in the Nara period (646-794) generally included the golden hall (kondo), pagoda (to), lecture hall (kodo), bell tower (shuro), scriptorium (kyozo), monks' dormitories (sobo), and refectory (jikido). This term, however, does not seem to appear in any Chinese or Japanese materials predating its use by the Japanese monk Ichijo Kanera (1402-1481) to refer to the layout of ZEN monasteries. His list of the seven halls consists of the mountain gate (sanmon), buddha hall (butsuden), DHARMA hall (hatto), kitchen-office (kuin), SAMGHA hall (sodo; see SENGTANG), bathhouse (yokushitsu), and latrine (seijo or tosu). The seven-hall design is now commonly laid out in anthropomorphic form, consisting of a central axis-the mountain gate (the privates), buddha hall (heart), and dharma hall (head)-flanked by two pairs of buildings, namely (1) the latrine (left leg) and bathhouse (right leg) and (2) the saMgha hall (left arm) and kitchen-office (right arm).
Shinchi Kakushin. (心地覺心) (1207-1298). Japanese ZEN teacher in the RINZAISHu, who is retrospectively regarded as the founder of the small FUKESHu branch of the Zen tradition; also known by his posthumous title HOTTo KOKUSHI. He became a monk at the age of fourteen in the SHINGONSHu esoteric tradition, and received full ordination at twenty-nine at ToDAIJI in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. Shinchi studied esoteric teachings at KoYASAN, the headquarters of the Shingon school, and engaged in Zen training under the Rinzai master Taiko Gyoyu (1163-1241) and the SoToSHu master DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253). Shinchi left for China in 1249 to study under the Chinese Linji master WUZHUN SHIFAN (1177-1249). Unfortunately, the master died before Shinchi arrived, so Shichi instead traveled to Hangzhou to study under WUMEN HUIKAI (1183-1260), in the YANGQI PAI of the LINJI ZONG. Wumen is said to have given Shinchi dharma transmission (CHUANFA) after just six months of training. Shinchi returned to Japan in 1254 with the master's robe and portrait, as well as a copy of the master's WUMEN GUAN, which was the first introduction of that famous GONG'AN (J. koan) collection to the Japanese isles. In present-day Wakayama prefecture, Shinchi built a monastery called Saihoji, which was later renamed Kokokuji. Shinchi resided there for the rest of his life, but often traveled to Kyoto to lecture on Buddhism before the retired monarchs Gofukakusa (r. 1246-1259), Kameyama (r. 1259-74) and Gouda (r. 1274-87). Kameyama granted him the honorary title "Hotto Zenji" (Zen Master Dharma Lamp). After his death, the Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339) later bestowed on him the posthumous title of Hotto Enmyo Kokushi (State Preceptor Lamp of Dharma that is Perfectly Bright). Shinchi came to be regarded as the founder of the Fukeshu, a smaller secondary school of Japanese Zen, whose itinerant practitioners played the bamboo flute (shakuhachi) as a form of meditation and wore a distinctive bamboo hat that covered the entire face. The school was proscribed in 1871 and vanished from the scene.
Sojiji. (總持寺). In Japanese, "DHĀRAnĪ Monastery"; one of the two main monasteries of the SoToSHu of ZEN Buddhism, located in Tsurumi, Yokohama. This monastery was originally established on the Noto peninsula (present-day Ishikawa prefecture) in 740 as Morookadera by the monk GYoGI (668-749), who also founded ToDAIJI. In 1321, KEIZAN JoKIN (1268-1325), the founding patriarch of the Soto Zen institution, came into possession of this local monastery, which he renamed Sojiji. In 1322, Sojiji were sanctioned as an official monastery by Emperor Godaigo (r. 1318-1339), an event that is traditionally considered to mark the official establishment of Soto as an independent Zen institution in Japan. Keizan later entrusted Sojiji to his disciple Gasan Joseki (1276-1366). Sojiji was an important government-sponsored monastery during the Muromachi and Edo periods and its status rivaled that of the other main Soto monastery, EIHEIJI; in its heyday, the monastery is said to have had more than seventy buildings within its precincts. After burning to the ground in 1898, the monastery was rebuilt in Yokohama in 1911, because Soto Zen leaders calculated that a location near Tokyo would have strategic value for the growth of the sect. Sojiji is entered through a gigantic copper-roofed gate (sanmon) that was built in 1969. The butsuden, or main buddha hall, was completed in 1915 and enshrines a statue of sĀKYAMUNI with his disciples MAHĀKĀsYAPA and ĀNANDA. There is a founders' hall (taisodo) for Keizan Jokin that displays statues of the major historical figures of the Soto Zen tradition and that also doubles as a lecture hall; in addition, there is a large SAMGHA hall (daisodo) for ordaining and training monks, which displays a statue of the BODHISATTVA MANJUsRĪ. Other buildings at the monastery include additional living quarters for the monks, a hall for Emperor Godaigo, and a homotsukan, or treasure house, full of important cultural properties held at the monastery, including a hanging tapestry from the Edo period that originally served as a cover for the chair of senior monks delivering sermons, and several precious buddha images.
Sonmun pojang nok. (禪門寶藏). In Korean, "Record of the Treasure Trove of the Son Tradition"; an anthology, in three rolls, of stories excerpted from various Chinese CHAN and Korean SoN texts. Although the preface of the Sonmun pojangnok was written in 1293 by the Koryo CH'oNTAE (Ch. TIANTAI) monk CH'oNCH'AEK (1206-?) to whom it is attributed, the exact authorship of the anthology is still a matter of some debate. The epilogue to the text was written in 1294 by the Koryo lay Buddhist literatus Yi Hon (1252-1312). The first roll, "The Gate That Compares Son and Kyo" (Son'gyo taebyon mun) advocates that Son is distinct from, and surpasses, KYO (Doctrinal Teachings) because, unlike Kyo, Son directly reveals Buddhist truth without relying on verbal explanation. The second roll, "The Gate through which all Kyo Lecturers Return and Yield" (Chegang kwibok mun) illustrates this superiority of Son over Kyo by citing several examples in which Kyo monks were embarrassed, or guided to an authentic awakening, by Chan or Son monks. The third roll, "The Gate Revered and Trusted by Kings and Vassals" (Kunsin sungsin mun) includes stories of kings and government officials respecting and honoring Chan and Son monks. One of the most interesting stories collected in the Sonmun pojang nok relates to the otherwise-unknown Patriarch Chin'gwi (Chin'gwi chosa). The story is recited twice in the first roll and once in the third, excerpted respectively from the Talma millok ("Secret Record of Bodhidharma"), the Haedong ch'iltae nok ("Record of the Seven Generations of the Patriarchs of Haedong [Korea]"), and the Wimyongje somun chegyong p'yon ("Section on the Emperor Ming of Wei Inquires about the Sutras"), none of which are extant. The story is extremely controversial, because it states that because sĀKYAMUNI Buddha's awakening under the BODHI TREE was still imperfect, he continued to wander looking for guidance, until he met a Chan patriarch in the Snowy Mountains (Himālaya) who was finally able to lead him to true awakening. Later, the renowned Choson monk SoNSAN HYUJoNG also included the same story in his Son'gyo sok ("Exposition of Son and Kyo"), but cited it instead from the Pomil kuksa chip ("Collected Works of the State Preceptor Pomil"), which is also not extant. However, since neither the story itself nor even the titles of any of the three texts cited in the Sonmun pojang nok are found in any Chinese Buddhist sources, it is presumed that the story itself was fabricated in Korea sometime between the times of PoMIL (810-889) and Ch'onch'aek. The Sonmun pojang nok is now embedded in the SoNMUN CH'WARYO and is also published in volume six of the Han'guk Pulgyo chonso ("Collected Works of Korean Buddhism").
Sudoksa. (修德寺). In Korean, "Cultivating Merit Monastery"; the seventh district monastery (PONSA) of the contemporary CHOGYE CHONG of Korean Buddhism, located on the slopes of Toksung (Virtue Exalted) mountain in South Ch'ungch'ong province. According to Sudoksa's monastic records, the monastery was first constructed at the end of the Paekche dynasty by Sungje (d.u.). During the reign of the Paekche king Mu (r. 600-641) the monk Hyehyon (d.u.) is said to have lectured there on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"). Alternate records state, however, that the monastery was founded by Chimyong (d.u.) during the reign of the Paekche king Pop (r. 599-600). The monastery was subsequently repaired by the renowned Koryo-dynasty Son monk NAONG HYEGŬN (1320-1376), and since that time Sudoksa has been one of the major centers of SoN (C. CHAN) practice in Korea. Sudoksa is best known for its TAEUNG CHoN, the main shrine hall. The taeung chon was rebuilt in 1308 and is presumed to be the oldest wooden building in Korea, having been spared the conflagrations that struck many Korean monasteries during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions (1592-1598). It was constructed in the Chusimp'o style, so that its support pillars are wider in the middle than they are at the bottom or top. The Tap'o-style bracketing, imported from Fujian during the Southern Song dynasty, is similar to other Koryo-era monasteries, such as Pongjongsa and PUSoKSA. Inside the hall are images of three buddhas, sĀKYAMUNI, AMITĀBHA and BHAIsAJYAGURU, and two bodhisattvas, MANJUsRĪ and SAMANTABHADRA. Paintings depict KsITIGARBHA, the ten kings of hell (see SHIWANG; YAMA), and some indigenous Korean divinities. Many of the oldest original wall paintings were damaged during the Korean War and have now been removed to the safety of the monastery's museum. The courtyard holds two STuPAs, a three-story stone pagoda probably from the Koryo dynasty, and an older seven-story granite pagoda from the late Paekche dynasty, with typical upward curving corners. There is a thirty-three foot high statue of Maitreya a short walk up the mountain; the statue is unusual in that it is wearing Korean clothes, including a double cylindrical hat. It was erected by the Son master MAN'GONG WoLMYoN (1872-1946), one of the renowned Son teachers of the modern era who taught at Sudoksa; other famous masters associated with the monastery include KYoNGHo SoNGU (1849-1912), the nun KIM IRYoP (1869-1971), and Hyeam Hyonmun (1884-1985). Sudoksa recently opened a museum near its entrance to hold the large number of important historical artistic and written works the monastery owns, such as the exquisite wall paintings that formerly were located in the taeung chon. In 1996, Sudoksa was elevated to the status of an ecumenical monastery (CH'ONGNIM), and is one of the five such centers in the contemporary Chogye order, which are all expected to provide training in the full range of practices that exemplify the major strands of the Korean Buddhist tradition; the monastery is thus also known as the Toksung Ch'ongnim.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. (鈴木大拙[貞太郎]) (1870-1966). A Japanese scholar of Zen Buddhism, widely regarded as the person most responsible for introducing ZEN thought to the West. Born in Kanazawa, D. T. Suzuki, as he is usually known in Western writings, was the son of a physician. He taught English in primary schools before enrolling in what is now Waseda University in Tokyo. While he was a university student, he traveled to Kamakura to practice Zen meditation at the monastery of ENGAKUJI under the direction of the RINZAI master SHAKU SoEN. He became Soen's disciple and translated into English Soen's lecture for the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions. Soen subsequently arranged for Suzuki to travel to America to work with PAUL CARUS, author of The Gospel of Buddha and a leading proponent of Buddhism in America. Suzuki lived with Carus' family in LaSalle, Illinois from 1897 to 1908, producing translations and writing his first book in English, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (1907). He returned to Japan in 1909, where he taught English until 1921, when he accepted a chair in Buddhist philosophy at otani University in Kyoto. In 1911, he married an American student of Buddhism, Beatrice Erskine Lane (1878-1939), who served as the coeditor of many of his books and published her own studies of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Suzuki remained in Japan during World War II, but in 1950, after the war, he returned to the United States and lectured on Zen Buddhism at a number of universities, including Columbia University, where he was a long-time visiting professor. Suzuki was a prolific author in both Japanese and English, and eventually came to be renowned in both academic traditions. Because Suzuki was something of an autodidact in Buddhism, he initially struggled to be accepted into the mainstream of Japanese academe, but his prodigious output (his writings in Japanese filled thirty-two volumes) and his emphasis on the Indian and Chinese foundations of Japanese Buddhism (at a time when Japanese nationalist interpretations of Buddhism were the order of the day) eventually brought him wide respect at home. In the West, he wrote on both Mahāyāna Buddhism and Zen. His writings on Mahāyāna Buddhism include his highly regarded English translation and study of the LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA and a critical edition of the Sanskrit recension of the GAndAVYuHA. But Suzuki's most influential works in English scholarship are his voluminous writings on the Zen tradition, including his three-volume Essays in Zen Buddhism, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, The Training of a Zen Buddhist Monk, and Zen and Japanese Culture. These books, for the first time, made Zen philosophy and history serious topics of Buddhological research, and also inspired many Zen popularizers, such as ALAN WATTS and JACK KEROUAC, whose works introduced the notion of "Zen" to the Western popular imagination. Suzuki also mentored many of the preeminent Western Buddhologists of the mid-twentieth century; even the notorious curmudgeon EDWARD CONZE gushed over Suzuki, such was his high regard for his Japanese colleague. Suzuki died in Tokyo at the age of ninety-six.
Suzuki Shunryu. (鈴木俊隆) (1904-1971). Japanese ZEN priest influential in American Buddhism during the mid-twentieth century. Suzuki Shunryu was born in a village forty miles southwest of Tokyo, the son of a poor Zen priest. After elementary school, he went to live at a temple run by a disciple of his father. He was ordained as a novice monk in 1917. After completing his secondary school education, where he excelled at English, he attended Komazawa University in Tokyo, the university affiliated with the Soto sect of Zen, graduating in 1930. He then went on to train at EIHEJI, the head temple of the SoToSHu. In 1932, he took over as priest of his father's temple before moving on to serve as abbot at the larger temple of Rinsoin. He married in 1935. He spent the war years at Rinsoin and, unlike many Buddhist priests, did not actively support the war, although his temple was used to house soldiers, Korean laborers, and children displaced by the bombing of Tokyo. After the war, he engaged in a common occupation of Zen priests: performing services for the dead, while also opening a kindergarten. In 1959, he accepted a post offered by the headquarters of the Soto sect to serve as priest at a Japanese-American Zen temple in San Francisco, where he performed religious services for a community of some sixty families. He began to give lectures in English and to lead meditation retreats at the San Francisco temple. He continued to serve as priest to the Japanese community until 1969, when the tensions between his Japanese parishioners and his American disciples led him to resign from his original position. He then founded the San Francisco Zen Center, which eventually established both a residential center in the city, a mountain center in Tassajara, and a farm at Green Gulch. In 1970, an edited version of some of his lectures were published as Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a work that became a bestseller and classic of American Zen. Suzuki died in San Francisco in 1971.
Taesŭng kisin non pyolgi. (C. Dasheng qixin lun bieji; J. Daijo kishinron bekki 大乘起信論別). In Korean, "Separate Record on the 'Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna,'" written by WoNHYO (617-686); a short commentary on the "Establishing the Meaning" (Liyi fen) and "Explanation" (Jieshi fen) chapters of the DASHENG QIXIN LUN. As Wonhyo himself explains, the Taesŭng kisin non pyolgi was meant to serve as personal notes for future reference, and the ideas broached in the Taesŭng kisin non pyolgi are expanded upon in detail in Wonhyo's longer commentary on the text, the TAESŬNG KISIN NON SO. There is also some evidence that the pyolgi may have been a transcription of his oral lectures on the Dasheng qixin lun, which was to be kept separate from Wonhyo's more formal commentary to the text.
Taixu. (太) (1889-1947). In Chinese, "Grand Voidness"; a leading figure in the Chinese Buddhist revival during the first half of the twentieth century. Taixu was ordained at the age of fourteen, purportedly because he wanted to acquire the supernatural powers of the buddhas. He studied under the famous Chinese monk, "Eight Fingers" (Bazhi Toutou), so called because he had burned off one finger of each hand in reverence to the Buddha, and achieved an awakening when reading a PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ SuTRA. In 1908, he joined a group of radicals, including other Buddhist monks, intent on revolution. In 1911, he organized the first of many groups (many of them short-lived) to revitalize Buddhism during this time of national crisis following the fall of the Qing dynasty. In 1912, he was involved in a failed attempt to turn the famous monastery of Chinshansi into a modern school for monks. After this disgrace, beginning in 1914, he went into retreat for three years, during which time he studied Buddhist scriptures and formulated plans to revitalize Buddhism, outlined in such works as his 1915 Zhengli sengqie zhidu lun ("The Reorganization of the SAMGHA System"). He drafted a number of such plans over the remainder of his career, although none was ever implemented. In general, these plans called for improved and modernized education for monks and their participation in community and governmental affairs. He believed that Buddhism had become ossified in China and needed to be reformed into a force that would both inspire and improve society. In his view, for an effective reform of the monastic system to take place, Chinese Buddhists had to be educated according to the same standards as those in other Buddhist countries, beginning with Japan. For Taixu, the revival of Chinese Buddhism entailed starting a dialogue with the Buddhist traditions of other Asian countries; hence, a modern Buddhism had to reach out to these traditions and incorporate their intuitions and original insights. It was from these initial ideas that, during the 1920s, Taixu developed a strong interest in Japanese MIKKYo and Tibetan VAJRAYĀNA, as well as in the THERAVĀDA tradition of Sri Lanka. Taixu's participation in the "Revival of Tantra" (mijiao chongxing) debates with Wang Hongyuan (1876-1937), a Chinese convert to Japanese SHINGON, demonstrated his eclectic ideas about the reformation of Chinese Buddhism. The first of Taixu's activities after his return to public life was the founding of the Bodhi Society (Jueshe) in Shanghai in 1918. He was involved in the publication of a wide variety of Buddhist periodicals, such as "Masses Enlightenment Weekly," "Sound of Enlightenment," "Buddhist Critic," "New Buddhist Youth," "Modern SaMgha," "Mind's Light," and the most enduring, "Sound of the Tides" (Haichaoyin). In 1922, he founded the Wuchang Buddhist Institute, where he hoped to produce a new generation of Buddhist leaders in China. In 1923, he founded the first of several "world Buddhist organizations," as a result of which he began to travel and lecture widely, becoming well known in Europe and America. He encouraged several of his students to learn the languages and traditions of Buddhist Asia. Among his students who went abroad in Tibet and Sri Lanka, FAZUN was the most accomplished in making several commentaries of late Indian Buddhism available to the Chinese public, thus fostering a comparison between the historical and doctrinal developments of Buddhism in China and in Tibet. In 1928 in Paris, Taixu donated funds for the establishment of the World Buddhist Institute, devoted to the unification of Buddhism and science; it would eventually be renamed Les Amis du Bouddhisme. He lectured in Sri Lanka and arranged an exchange program under which Chinese monks would study there. In 1929, he organized the Chinese Buddhist Society, which would eventually attract millions of members. During the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, Taixu followed the Nationalist government into retreat in Sichuan. In this period, as a result of his efforts to internationalize Chinese Buddhism, Taixu founded two branches of the Wuchang Institute of Buddhist Studies specializing in Pāli and Tibetan Buddhism: the Pāli Language Institute in Xi'an, and the Sino-Tibetan Institute in Chongqing. In 1937, at the Sino-Tibetan Institute, in his famous essay "Wo de fojiao geming shibai shi" ("History of My Failed Buddhist Revolutions"), Taixu began an earnest self-reflection on his lifelong efforts to reform Chinese Buddhism, deeming them a failure in three domains: conceiving a Buddhist revolution, globalizing Buddhist education, and reorganizing the Chinese Buddhist Association. When the first global Buddhist organization, the WORLD FELLOWSHIP OF BUDDHISTS, was founded in 1950, Taixu, who had died three years earlier, was credited as its inspiration. His insights would eventually be developed and implemented by later generations of Buddhists in China and Taiwan. His collected works were published in sixty-four volumes. Several of the leading figures of modern and contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese Buddhism were close disciples of Taixu, including Fazun (1902-1980), Yinshun (1905-2005), Shengyan (1930-2009), and Xingyun (1927-).
Takakusu Junjiro. (高楠順次郎) (1866-1945). One of the leading Japanese scholars of Indian Buddhism of the early twentieth century, who played a leading role in establishing Japan as a major center of scholarship in Buddhist Studies. He was born, surnamed Sawai, in today's Hiroshima prefecture. He was raised in a JoDO SHINSHu family belonging to the NISHI HONGANJIHA, and he remained a devout layman throughout his life. After primary school, he studied at the leading Jodo Shinshu educational institution, today's Ryukoku University, from 1885 to 1889, during which time, through Jodo Shinshu connections, he was adopted into the Takakusu merchant house of Kobe. With the support of his adoptive father, he spent the period from 1890 to 1897 in Europe. Through the introduction of the Jodo Shinshu cleric NANJo BUN'Yu, Takakusu was able to study Indology under FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER at Oxford University, receiving a B.A. in 1894 and an M.A. in 1896. While at Oxford, he assisted Müller with the Sacred Books of the East project. The final volume of the series, entitled Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts (1894), included the VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA, the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYA, and the three PURE LAND sutras, all Indian works (or at least so regarded at the time) but selected because of their importance for Japanese Buddhism. Müller's choice of these texts was influenced by Takakusu and Nanjo Bun'yu. The works in Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts were translated by Müller, with the exception of the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, which was translated by Takakusu. Takakusu also studied in Paris with SYLVAIN LÉVI, with whom he would later collaborate on the Hobogirin Buddhist encyclopedia project. He returned to Japan in 1897 to lecture in Indian philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, where he served as professor from 1899 to 1927, being appointed to the chair of Sanskrit studies in 1901. He was a devoted supporter of Esperanto and in 1906 was a founding member of the Japanese Esperantists Association. He supervised and contributed substantially to three monumental publishing projects: (1) the Upanishaddo zensho, a Japanese translation of the Upanisads (1922-1924); (2) the TAISHo SHINSHu DAIZoKYo, a modern typeset edition of the East Asian Buddhist canon (see DAZANGJING) (1922-1934); and (3) the Kokuyaku nanden daizokyo, a Japanese translation of the Pāli canon of what he called "Southern Buddhism" (1936-1941). For his work on editing the Taisho canon, he was awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien in Sinology from the Institut de France in 1929. Among his English-language publications, he is known especially for A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (1896), which is his translation of YIJING's pilgrimage record (NANHAI JIGUI NEIFA ZHUAN), and Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy (1947). He died in Shizuoka Prefecture, outside Tokyo.
Taylor, Alfred Edward: Born in 1869, professor of philosophy at St. Andrews and Edinburgh, after teaching for many years at Oxford. Taylor's metaphysics were predominantly Hegelian and idealist (as in Elements of Metaphysics) during his early years, in later years (as in numerous essays in Mind, and his Gifford Lectures Faith of a Moralist) he has become something of a neo-scholastic, although he follows no school exclusively. In his Gifford Lectures he argues from moral experience to God; in other essays, he declares that grounds for belief are found in cosmology, in conscience and in religious experience. As an Anglo-Catholic, he has given (in volume two of his Giffords) a learned apologia for this position, on philosophical grounds. -- W.N.P.
Teisho. (J) (提唱). In Japanese, "ZEN lecture." See TICHANG.
Terezin (Czech), Theresienstadt (German) ::: Established in early 1942 outside Prague as a "model" ghetto, Terezin was not a sealed section of town, but rather an eighteenth-century Austrian garrison. It became a Jewish town, governed and guarded by the SS. When the deportations from central Europe to the extermination camps began in the spring of 1942, certain groups were initially excluded: invalids; partners in a mixed marriage, and their children; and prominent Jews with special connections. These were sent to the ghetto in Terezin. They were joined by old and young Jews from the Protectorate, and, later, by small numbers of prominent Jews from Denmark and Holland. Its large barracks served as dormitories for communal living; they also contained offices, workshops, infirmaries, and communal kitchens. The Nazis used Terezin to deceive public opinion. They tolerated a lively cultural life of theater, music, lectures, and art. Thus, it could be shown to officials of the International Red Cross. Terezin, however, was only a station on the road
text-book ::: n. --> A book with wide spaces between the lines, to give room for notes.
A volume, as of some classical author, on which a teacher lectures or comments; hence, any manual of instruction; a schoolbook.
theatre ::: n. --> An edifice in which dramatic performances or spectacles are exhibited for the amusement of spectators; anciently uncovered, except the stage, but in modern times roofed.
Any room adapted to the exhibition of any performances before an assembly, as public lectures, scholastic exercises, anatomical demonstrations, surgical operations, etc.
That which resembles a theater in form, use, or the like; a place rising by steps or gradations, like the seats of a theater.
The first Dalai Lama, DGE 'DUN GRUB, was known as a great scholar and religious practitioner. A direct disciple of TSONG KHA PA, he is remembered for founding BKRA SHIS LHUN PO monastery near the central Tibetan town of Shigatse. The second Dalai Lama, Dge 'dun rgya mtsho, was born the son of a RNYING MA YOGIN and became a renowned tantric master in his own right. ¶ It is with the third Dalai Lama, BSOD NAMS RGYA MTSHO, that the Dalai Lama lineage actually begins. Recognized at a young age as the reincarnation of Dge 'dun rgya mtsho, he was appointed abbot of 'BRAS SPUNGS monastery near LHA SA and soon rose to fame throughout central Asia as a Buddhist teacher. He served as a religious master for the Mongol ruler Altan Khan, who bestowed the title "Dalai Lama," and is credited with converting the Tümed Mongols to Buddhism. Later in life, he traveled extensively across eastern Tibet and western China, teaching and carrying out monastic construction projects. ¶ The fourth Dalai Lama, Yon tan rgya mtsho, was recognized in the person of the grandson of Altan Khan's successor, solidifying Mongol-Tibetan ties. ¶ While the first four Dalai Lamas served primarily as religious scholars and teachers, the fifth Dalai Lama, NGAG DBANG BLO BZANG RGYA MTSHO, combined religious and secular activities to become one of Tibet's preeminent statesmen. He was a dynamic political leader who, with the support of Gushi Khan, defeated his opponents and in 1642 was invested with temporal powers over the Tibetan state, in addition to his religious role, a position that succeeding Dalai Lamas held until 1959. A learned and prolific author, he and his regent, SDE SRID SANGS RGYAS RGYA MTSHO, were largely responsible for the identification of the Dalai Lamas with the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. The construction of the PO TA LA palace began during his reign (and was completed after this death). He is popularly known as the "Great Fifth." ¶ The sixth Dalai Lama, TSHANGS DBYANGS RGYA MTSHO, was a controversial figure who chose to abandon the strict monasticism of his predecessors in favor of a life of society and culture, refusing to take the vows of a fully ordained monk (BHIKsU). He is said to have frequented the drinking halls below the Po ta la palace. He constructed pleasure gardens and the temple of the NAGAs, called the KLU KHANG, on the palace grounds. He is remembered especially for his poetry, which addresses themes such as love and the difficulty of spiritual practice. Tibetans generally interpret his behavior as exhibiting an underlying tantric wisdom, a skillful means for teaching the dharma. His death is shrouded in mystery. Official accounts state that he died while under arrest by Mongol troops. According to a prominent secret biography (GSANG BA'I RNAM THAR), however, he lived many more years, traveling across Tibet in disguise. ¶ The seventh Dalai Lama, SKAL BZANG RGYA MTSHO, was officially recognized only at the age of twelve, and due to political complications, did not participate actively in affairs of state. He was renowned for his writings on tantra and his poetry. ¶ The eighth Dalai Lama, 'Jam dpal rgya mtsho (Jampal Gyatso, 1758-1804), built the famous NOR BU GLING KHA summer palace. ¶ The ninth through twelfth Dalai Lamas each lived relatively short lives, due, according to some accounts, to political intrigue and the machinations of power-hungry regents. According to tradition, from the death of one Dalai Lama to the investiture of the next Dalai Lama as head of state (generally a period of some twenty years), the nation was ruled by a regent, who was responsible for discovering the new Dalai Lama and overseeing his education. If the Dalai Lama died before reaching his majority, the reign of the regent was extended. ¶ The thirteenth Dalai Lama, THUB BSTAN RGYA MTSHO, was an astute and forward-looking political leader who guided Tibet through a period of relative independence during a time of foreign entanglements with Britain, China, and Russia. In his last testament, he is said to have predicted Tibet's fall to Communist China. ¶ The fourteenth and present Dalai Lama, Bstan 'dzin rgya mtsho, assumed his position several years prior to reaching the age of majority as his country faced the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. In 1959, he escaped into exile, establishing a government-in-exile in the Himalayan town of Dharamsala (DHARMAsALA) in northwestern India. Since then, he has traveled and taught widely around the world, while also advocating a nonviolent solution to Tibet's occupation. He was born in the A mdo region of what is now Qinghai province in China to a farming family, although his older brother had already been recognized as an incarnation at a nearby important Dge lugs monastery (SKU 'BUM). On his becoming formally accepted as Dalai Lama, his family became aristocrats and moved to Lha sa. He was educated traditionally by private tutors (yongs 'dzin), under the direction first of the regent Stag brag rin po che (in office 1941-1950), and later Gling rin po che Thub bstan lung rtogs rnam rgyal (1903-1983) and Khri byang rin po che Blo bzang ye shes (1901-1981). His modern education was informal, gained from conversations with travelers, such as the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer. When the Chinese army entered the Khams region of eastern Tibet in 1951, he formally took over from the regent and was enthroned as the head of the DGA' LDAN PHO BRANG government. In the face of Tibetan unrest as the Chinese government brought Tibet firmly under central control, the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959; the Indian government accorded the Dalai Lama respect as a religious figure but did not accept his claim to be the head of a separate state. In 1989, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an event that increased his prominence around the world. He is the author of many books in English, most of them the written record of lectures and traditional teachings translated from Tibetan.
Thích Nhất Hạnh. (釋一行) (1926-). Internationally renowned Vietnamese monk and one of the principal propounders of "Engaged Buddhism." He was born in southern Vietnam, the son of a government bureaucrat. Nhát Hạnh entered a Buddhist monastery as a novice in 1942, where he studied with a Vietnamese Zen master, and received full ordination as a monk in 1949. His interests in philosophy, literature, and foreign languages led him to leave the Buddhist seminary to study at Saigon University. While teaching in a secondary school, he served as editor of the periodical "Vietnamese Buddhism," the organ of the Association of All Buddhists in Vietnam. In 1961, he went to the United States to study at Princeton University, returning to South Vietnam in December 1963 after the overthrow of the government of the Catholic president Ngô Đình Diem, which had actively persecuted Buddhists. The persecutions had led to widespread public protests that are remembered in the West through photographs of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks. Nhát Hạnh worked to found the Unified Buddhist Church and the Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies, which later became Vạn Hạnh University. He devoted much of his time to the School of Youth for Social Service, which he founded and of which he was the director. The school's activities included sending teams of young people to the countryside to offer various forms of social assistance to the people. He also founded a new Buddhist sect (the Order of Interbeing), and helped establish a publishing house, all of which promoted what he called Engaged Buddhism. A collection of his pacifist poetry was banned by the governments of both North and South Vietnam. While engaging in nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War, he also sought to aid its victims. In 1966, Nhát Hạnh promulgated a five-point peace plan while on an international lecture tour, during which he met with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who would later nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize) and Thomas Merton in the United States, addressed the House of Commons in Britain, and had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome. The book that resulted from his lecture tour, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, was banned by the South Vietnamese government. Fearing that he would be arrested or assassinated if he returned to Vietnam after the lecture tour, his supporters urged him to remain abroad and he has lived in exile ever since, residing primarily in France. He founded a center called Plum Village in southern France, whence he has sought to assist Vietnamese refugees and political prisoners and to teach Engaged Buddhism to large audiences in Europe and the Americas. A prolific writer, he has published scores of books on general, nonsectarian Buddhist teachings and practices, some of which have become bestsellers. He has made numerous trips abroad to teach and lead meditation retreats. In his teachings, Nhát Hạnh calls for a clear recognition and analysis of suffering, identifying its causes, and then working to relieve present suffering and prevent future suffering through nonviolent action. Such action in bringing peace can only truly succeed when the actor is at peace or, in his words, is "being peace."
Thông Biẹn. (通辦) (d. 1134). The first Vietnamese Buddhist author to write a history of Vietnamese Buddhism based on the model of the "transmission of the lamplight" (CHUANDENG) histories of the Chinese CHAN school. He was a native of Đan Phượng (which is now in Hà Tay province, North Vietnam). His family name was Ngô and he was born into a Buddhist family. He was respected by the Lý court and was bestowed the title quềc sư (state preceptor; C. GUOSHI). The THIỀN UYỂN TẬP ANH relates that in a lecture in 1096 he interpreted Vietnamese Buddhist history as the continuation of the transmission of both the scriptural school and the mind (or Chan) school of Chinese Buddhism. According to Thông Biẹn, the Scriptural School began with Mou Bo and Kang Senghui, and the Chan school was transmitted by BODHIDHARMA. He further claimed that Chan came to Vietnam through two streams, represented, respectively, by VINĪTARUCI (d. 594) and VÔ NGÔN THÔNG (d. 826). Vinītaruci and Vô Ngôn Thông thus were the ancestral teachers of the two streams of Chan that produced numerous side branches in Vietnam. Later in his life, Thông Biẹn founded a great teaching center and taught the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. His contemporaries referred to him as Ngộ Phap Hoa (Awakened to the Lotus). Thông Biẹn's model of Vietnamese Buddhist history was subsequently adopted by Buddhist authors of later generations and thus exercised lasting influence on the traditional understanding of Vietnamese Buddhist history. Many modern Vietnamese Buddhist leaders still accept Thông Biẹn's views about the history of Buddhism in Vietnam.
Thoreau, Henry David: (1817-1862) One of the leading American transcendentilists, of the Concord group. He was a thoroughgoing individualist, most famous for the attempts to be self-sufficient that he recounts so brilliantly in his diaries, lectures, essays and expositions, such was the famous "Walden". -- L.E.D.
Tiantai Zhiyi. (J. Tendai Chigi; K. Ch'ont'ae Chiŭi 天台智顗) (538-597). One of the most influential monks in Chinese Buddhist history and de facto founder of the TIANTAI ZONG. A native of Jingzhou (in present-day Hunan province), Zhiyi was ordained at the age of eighteen after his parents died during the wartime turmoil that preceded the Sui dynasty's unification of China. He studied VINAYA and various MAHĀYĀNA scriptures, including the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") and related scriptures. In 560, Zhiyi met NANYUE HUISI (515-577), who is later listed as the second patriarch of the Tiantai lineage, on Mt. Dasu in Guangzhou and studied Huisi's teachings on the suiziyi sanmei (cultivating SAMĀDHI wherever mind is directed, or the samādhi of freely flowing thoughts), the "four practices of ease and bliss" (si anle xing), a practice based on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra, and the lotus repentance ritual. Zhiyi left Huisi at his teacher's command and headed for the southern capital of Jinling (present-day Jiangsu province) at the age of thirty (567) to teach the Saddharmapundarīkasutra and the DAZHIDU LUN for eight years at the monastery of Waguansi. The Shi chanboluomi cidi famen [alt. Cidi chanmen] are his lecture notes from this period of meditation and teaching. In 575, he retired to Mt. Tiantai (present-day Zhejiang province), where he built a monastery (later named Xiuchansi by the emperor) and devoted himself to meditative practice for eleven years. During this time he compiled the Fajie cidi chumen and the Tiantai xiao zhiguan. After persistent invitations from the king of Chen, Zhiyi returned to Jinling in 585 and two years later wrote the FAHUA WENJU, an authoritative commentary on the Saddharmapundarīkasutra. Subsequently in Yangzhou, Zhiyi conferred the bodhisattva precepts on the crown prince, who later became Emperor Yang (r. 604-617) of the Sui dynasty. Zhiyi was then given the title Great Master Zhizhe (Wise One). Zhiyi also established another monastery on Mt. Dangyang in Yuquan (present-day Hunan province), which Emperor Wen (r. 581-604) later named Yuquansi. Zhiyi then began lecturing on what became his masterpieces, the FAHUA XUANYI (593) and the MOHE ZHIGUAN (594). At the request of the king of Jin, in 595 Zhiyi returned to Yangzhou, where he composed his famous commentaries on the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, i.e., the Weimojing xuanshou and the Weimojing wenshou, before dying in 597. Among the thirty or so works attributed to Zhiyi, the Fahua xuanyi, Fahuawenju, and Mohe zhiguan are most renowned and are together known as the Tiantai san dabu (three great Tiantai commentaries).
Tiantong Rujing. (J. Tendo Nyojo; K. Ch'ondong Yojong 天童如浄) (1162-1227). Chinese CHAN master in the CAODONG ZONG, also known as Jingchang (Pure Chang) and Changweng (Old Man Chang); he received his toponym Tiantong after the mountain where he once dwelled. Rujing was a native of Shaoxing in Yuezhou (present-day Zhejiang province) and was ordained at a local monastery named Tianyisi. Rujing later went to the monastery of Zishengsi on Mt. Xuedou to study under Zu'an Zhijian (1105-1192) and eventually became his dharma heir. Rujing spent the next few decades moving from one monastery to the next. In 1220, he found himself at Qingliangsi in Jiankang (Jiangsu province) and then at Rui'ansi in Taizhou and Jingcisi in Linan. In 1224, Rujing was appointed by imperial decree to the abbotship of the famous monastery of Jingdesi on Mt. Tiantong, where the Chan master HONGZHI ZHENGJUE had once resided. Rujing's teachings can be found in his recorded sayings (YULU), which were preserved in Japan. Although Rujing was a relatively minor figure in the history of Chinese Chan, he was profoundly influential in Japanese ZEN, due to the fact that the Japanese SoToSHu founder DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253) considered himself to be Rujing's successor. Dogen attributes many of the distinctive features of his own approach to practice, such as "just sitting" (SHIKAN TAZA) and "body and mind sloughed off" (SHINJIN DATSURAKU) to this man whom he regarded as the preeminent Chan master of his era. Little of this distinctively Soto terminology and approach actually appears in the records of Rujing's own lectures, however. Instead, he appears in his discourse record as a fairly typical Song-dynasty Chan master, whose only practical meditative instruction involves the contemplation of ZHAOZHOU's "no" (see WU GONG'AN). This difference may reflect the differing editorial priorities of Rujing's Chinese disciples. It might also derive from the fact that Dogen misunderstood Rujing or received simplified private instructions from him because of Dogen's difficulty in following Rujing's formal oral presentations in vernacular Chinese.
tichang. (J. teisho; K. chech'ang 提唱). In Chinese, "lecture," a type of discourse associated especially with the CHAN ZONG and widely known in the West by its Japanese pronunciation teisho; also called tigang (J. teiko, K. chegang) or tiyao (J. teiyo, K. cheyo). Such lectures, which were often delivered in highly colloquial language, sought to point to the main purport of a Chan tradition, text, or "case" (GONG'AN) by drawing on the peculiar Chan argot and extensively citing Chan literature and Buddhist scriptures. Chan masters might also deliver a sequential series of lectures on each of the Chan cases in a larger gong'an collection, such as the BIYAN LU or the WUMEN GUAN. Such lectures were sometimes delivered in conjunction with the formal "ascending the hall" (SHANGTANG) procedure; the term may also refer to the master's expository comments regarding questions that visitors might raise in the course of listening to a formal lecture. The tichang lecture is the Chan counterpart of expositions of Buddhist teachings given by lecturers in doctrinal schools, but making more use of Chan rather than commentarial and scriptural materials. The term was widely used in the Chan tradition especially from the Song dynasty onward. Although the term appears only rarely in such Chan codes as the BAIZHANG QINGGUI ("Baizhang's Pure Rules") and the CHANYUAN QINGGUI ("Pure Rules of the Chan Garden"), these sources do describe the general procedures to be followed in delivering such a lecture. The forty-two roll Liezu tigang lu ("Record of the Lectures of Successive Patriarchs," using the alternate term tigang), compiled by the Qing-dynasty Chan master Daiweng Xingyue (1619-1684), collects about four hundred Chinese masters' lectures delivered at various special occasions, such as the reigning emperor's birthday or funeral, and in conjunction with daily services.
Todaiji. (東大寺). In Japanese, "Great Monastery of the East"; a major monastery in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara affiliated with the Kegon (HUAYAN) school of Buddhism, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The monastery was founded by the Hossoshu (FAXIANG ZONG) monk GYoGI (668-749). The monastery is renowned for its colossal buddha image of VAIROCANA (J. Birushana nyorai), which is commonly known as the NARA DAIBUTSU; at forty-eight feet (fifteen meters) high, this image is the largest extant gilt-bronze image in the world and the Daibutsuden where the image is enshrined is the world's largest wooden building. The Indian monk BODHISENA (J. Bodaisenna) (704-760), who traveled to Japan in 736 at the invitation of Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), performed the "opening the eyes" (KAIYAN; NETRAPRATIstHĀPANA) ceremony for the 752 dedication of the great buddha image. Todaiji was founded on the site of Konshusenji by order of Emperor Shomu and became the headquarters of a network of provincial monasteries and convents in the Yamato region. The first abbot, Ryoben (689-773), is commemorated in the kaisando (founder's hall; see KAISHAN). Other halls include the inner sanctuary of the hokkedo (lotus hall), which was probably once Konshusenji's main hall. The hall enshrines the Fukukensaku Kannon, a dry lacquer statue of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA, which dates from 746. The monastery was renamed Konkomyoji in 741 and, in 747 when major construction began on the large compound, it finally became known as Todaiji, the name it retains today. The Todaiji complex was completed in 798; monastery records state that 50,000 carpenters, 370,000 metal workers, and 2.18 million laborers worked on the compound, its buildings, and their furnishings, almost bankrupting the country. Entering the monastery through the Great Gate to the South (Nandaimon), itself a Japanese national treasure, a visitor would have passed through two seven-storied, 328-foot high pagodas to the east and west (both subsequently destroyed by earthquakes), before passing through the Inner Gate to the Daibutsuden. North of the Daibutsuden, which is flanked by a belfry and a SuTRA repository, is the kodo (lecture hall), which is surrounded on three sides by the monk's quarters. An ordination hall displays exceptional clay-modeled shitenno (four heavenly kings; see LOKAPĀLA) dating from the Tenpyo Era (729-749). Of the eighth-century buildings, only the tegaimon (the western gate) and the Hokkedo's inner sanctuary have survived. After a conflagration in 1180, then-abbot Chogen (1121-1206) spearheaded a major reconstruction in a style he had seen in Southern Song-dynasty China. This style is exemplified by the south gate, which is protected by two humane-kings statues, both twenty-eight feet in height, carved in 1203. The Tokugawa Shogunate sponsored a second reconstruction after another fire in 1567 and the current Daibutsuden dates from about 1709. The Shosoin repository at the monastery, itself a Japanese national treasure (kokuho), contains over nine thousand precious ornamental and fine-art objects that date from the monastery's founding in the eighth century, including scores of objects imported into Japan via the SILK ROAD from all over Asia, including cut-glass bowls and silk brocade from Persia, Byzantine cups, Egyptians chests, and Indian harps, as well as Chinese Tang and Korean Silla musical instruments, etc. Every spring, the two-week long Omizutori (water-drawing) festival is conducted at Todaiji, which is thought to cure physical ailments and cleanse moral transgressions.
Toshodaiji. (唐招提寺). In Japanese, "Monastery for a Tang Wanderer"; located in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara and the head monastery of the VINAYA school (J. Risshu). Toshodaiji was originally a residence for Prince Niitabe, who donated it to the Tang-Chinese monk GANJIN (C. Jianzhen; 688-763), the founder of the vinaya school (RISSHu) in Japan. Ganjin came to Japan in 759 at the invitation of two Japanese monks who had studied with him in China at his home monastery of Damingsi (J. Daimyoji) in present-day Yangzhou. Ganjin tried to reach Japan five times before finally succeeding; then sixty-six and blind, he established an ordination platform at ToDAIJI before moving to Toshodaiji, where he passed away in 763. The monastery's name thus refers to Ganjin, a "wandering monk from Tang." The kondo, the golden hall that is the monastery's main shrine, was erected after Ganjin's death and finished around 781, followed three decades later by the monastery's five-story pagoda, which was finished in 810. The kondo is one of the few Nara-period temple structures that has survived and is one of the reasons why the monastery is so prized. It was built in the Yosemune style, with a colonnade with eight pillars, and enshrines three main images: the cosmic buddha VAIROCANA at the center, flanked by BHAIsAJYAGURU, and a thousand-armed AVALOKITEsVARA (see SĀHASRABHUJASĀHASRANETRĀVALOKITEsVARA), only 953 of which remain today, with images of BRAHMĀ and INDRA at the sides and statues of the four heavenly king protectors of Buddhism standing in each corner. The kodo, or lecture hall, was moved to the monastery from Heijo Palace and is the only extant structure that captures the style of a Tenpyo palace; it houses a statue of the bodhisattva MAITREYA. A kyozo, or SuTRA repository, holds the old library. The monastery also includes a treasure repository, a bell tower, and an ordination platform in the lotus pond. In 763, as Ganjin's death neared, he had a memorial statue of himself made and installed in his quarters at Toshodaiji. This dry-lacquer statue of a meditating Ganjin is enshrined today in the mieido (image hall), but is brought out for display only on his memorial days of June 5-7 each year; it is the oldest example in Japan of such a memorial statue. Toshodaiji was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.
U. Cassina, L'oeuvre philosophique de G. Peano, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 40 (1933), pp. 481-491. Peirce, Charles Sanders: American Philosopher. Born in Cambridge, Mass, on September 10th, 1839. Harvard M.A. in 1862 and Sc. B. in 1863. Except for a brief cireer as lectuier in philosophy at Harvard, 1864-65 and 1869-70 and in logic at Johns Hopkins, 1879-84, he did no formal teaching. Longest tenure was with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey for thirty years beginning in 1861. Died at Milford, Pa. in 1914 He had completed only one work, The Grand Logic, published posthumously (Coll. Papers). Edited Studies in Logic (1883). No volumes published during his lifetime but author of many lectures, essays and reviews in periodicals, particularly in the Popular Science Monthly, 1877-78, and in The Monist, 1891-93, some of which have been reprinted in Chance, Love and Logic (1923), edited by Morris R. Cohen, and. together with the best of his other work both published and unpublished, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-35), edited by Charles Hartshorne ¦ind Paul Weiss. He was most influenced by Kant, who had he thought, raised all the relevant philosophical problems but from whom he differed on almost every solution. He was excited by Darwin, whose doctrine of evolution coincided with his own thought, and disciplined by laboratory experience in the physical sciences which inspired his search for rigor and demonstration throughout his work. Felt himself deeply opposed to Descartes, whom he accused of being responsible for the modern form of the nominalistic error. Favorably inclined toward Duns Scotus, from whom he derived his realism. Philosophy is a sub-class of the science of discovery, in turn a branch of theoretical science. The function of philosophy is to expliin and hence show unity in the variety of the universe. All philosophy takes its start in logic, or the relations of signs to their objects, and phenomenology, or the brute experience of the objective actual world. The conclusions from these two studies meet in the three basic metaphysical categories: quality, reaction, and representation. Quality is firstness or spontaneity; reaction is secondness or actuality; and representation is thirdness or possibility. Realism (q.v.) is explicit in the distinction of the modes of being actuality as the field of reactions, possibility as the field of quality (or values) and representation (or relations). He was much concerned to establish the realism of scientific method: that the postulates, implications and conclusions of science are the results of inquiry yet presupposed by it. He was responsible for pragmatism as a method of philosophy that the sum of the practical consequences which result by necessity from the truth of an intellectual conception constitutes the entire meaning of that conception. Author of the ethical principle that the limited duration of all finite things logically demands the identification of one's interests with those of an unlimited community of persons and things. In his cosmology the flux of actuality left to itself develops those systematic characteristics which are usually associated with the realm of possibility. There is a logical continuity to chance events which through indefinite repetition beget order, as illustrated in the tendency of all things to acquire habits. The desire of all things to come together in this certain order renders love a kind of evolutionary force. Exerted a strong influence both on the American pragmatist, William James (1842-1910), the instrumentalist, John Dewey (1859-), as well as on the idealist, Jociah Royce (1855-1916), and many others. -- J.K.F.
wavelet "mathematics" A waveform that is bounded in both {frequency} and duration. Wavelet tranforms provide an alternative to more traditional {Fourier transforms} used for analysing waveforms, e.g. sound. The {Fourier transform} converts a signal into a continuous series of {sine waves}, each of which is of constant frequency and {amplitude} and of infinite duration. In contrast, most real-world signals (such as music or images) have a finite duration and abrupt changes in frequency. Wavelet transforms convert a signal into a series of wavelets. In theory, signals processed by the wavelet transform can be stored more efficiently than ones processed by Fourier transform. Wavelets can also be constructed with rough edges, to better approximate real-world signals. For example, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation found that Fourier transforms proved inefficient for approximating the whorls of fingerprints but a wavelet transform resulted in crisper reconstructed images. {SBG Austria (http://mat.sbg.ac.at/~uhl/wav.html)}. ["Ten Lectures on Wavelets", Ingrid Daubechies]. (1994-11-09)
wavelet ::: (mathematics) A waveform that is bounded in both frequency and duration. Wavelet tranforms provide an alternative to more traditional Fourier transforms used for analysing waveforms, e.g. sound.The Fourier transform converts a signal into a continuous series of sine waves, each of which is of constant frequency and amplitude and of infinite duration. In contrast, most real-world signals (such as music or images) have a finite duration and abrupt changes in frequency.Wavelet transforms convert a signal into a series of wavelets. In theory, signals processed by the wavelet transform can be stored more efficiently than ones processed by Fourier transform. Wavelets can also be constructed with rough edges, to better approximate real-world signals.For example, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation found that Fourier transforms proved inefficient for approximating the whorls of fingerprints but a wavelet transform resulted in crisper reconstructed images. .[Ten Lectures on Wavelets, Ingrid Daubechies]. (1994-11-09)
Whitehead, Alfred North: British philosopher. Born in 1861. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1911-14. Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London, 1914-24. Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. From 1924 until retirement in 1938, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Among his most important philosophical works are the Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (1910-13) (with Bertrand Russell; An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919); The Concept of Nature (1920); Science and the Modern World (1926); Religion tn the Making (1926); Symbolism (1928); Process and Reality (1929); and Adventures of Ideas (1933). The principle of relativity in physics is the key to the understanding of metaphysics. Whitehead opposes the current philosophy of static substance having qualities which he holds to be based on the simply located material bodies of Newtonian physics and the "pure sensations" of Hume. This 17th century philosophy depends upon a "bifurcation of nature" into two unequal systems of reality on the Cartesian model of mind and matter. The high abstractions of science must not be mistaken for concrete realities. Instead, Whitehead argues that there is only one reality, what appears, whatever is given in perception, is real. There is nothing existing beyond what is present in the experience of subjects, understanding by subject any actual entity. There are neither static concepts nor substances in the world; only a network of events. All such events are actual extensions or spatio-temporal unities. The philosophy of organism, as Whitehead terms his work, is based upon the patterned process of events. All things or events are sensitive to the existence of all others; the relations between them consisting in a kind of feeling. Every actual entity is then a "prehensive occasion", that is, it consists of all those active relations with other things into which it enters. An actual entity is further determined by "negative prehension", the exclusion of all that which it is not. Thus every feeling is a positive prehension, every abstraction a negative one. Every actual entity is lost as an individual when it perishes, but is preserved through its relations with other entities in the framework of the world. Also, whatever has happened must remain an absolute fact. In this sense, past events have achieved "objective immortality". Except for this, the actual entities are involved in flux, into which there is the ingression of eternal objects from the realm of possibilities. The eternal objects are universals whose selection is necessary to the actual entities. Thus the actual world is a certain selection of eternal objects. God is the principles of concretion which determines the selection. "Creativity" is the primal cause whereby possibilities are selected in the advance of actuality toward novelty. This movement is termed the consequent nature of God. The pure possibility of the eternal objects themsehes is termed his primordial nature. -- J.K.F.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: (Lecturer in philosophy at University of Cambridge, 1929-1939; professor and head of department since 1939. Author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922.
Wittgenstein's doctrines were a major influence in the evolution of Logical Positivism (q.v.) though his later work is out of sympathy with that movement. Later lectures (in the form of unpublished mimeographed notes) embody a more relativistic approach to language, and are largely devoted to the inculcation of a therapeutic method directed against the perennial temptation to ask senseless questions in philosophy.
Won'gwang. (C. Yuanguang 圓光) (542-640). In Korean, "Consummate Brilliance"; Silla-dynasty monk known as an early exponent of the VINAYA tradition in Korea. Won'gwang went to the Chinese kingdom of Chen and studied various texts such as the *TATTVASIDDHI and the MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA. After the fall of the Chen dynasty, Won'gwang traveled to Chang'an, where he attended lectures on ASAnGA'S MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA delivered by the monk Tanqian (542-607). Won'gwang returned to Korea in 600 and devised a set of lay precepts known as the "five secular injunctions" (Sesok ogye) at the request of two "flower youths" (hwarang) named Kwisan (d.u.) and Ch'uhang (d.u.). These injunctions adapted Confucian and Buddhist moral codes to the needs of a militant society involved in the ongoing peninsular reunification wars. The five are (1) loyalty, (2) filial piety, (3) trust, (4) not killing wantonly, and (5) not retreating in battle. According to his biography in the HAEDONG KOSŬNG CHoN, Won'gwang was also a renowned thaumaturge and tamer of autochthonous spirits. He passed away at the royal monastery of HWANGNYONGSA. Two commentaries on the TATHĀGATAGARBHASuTRA, the Taebangdŭng yoraejanggyong so and Yoraejanggyong sagi, are attributed to Won'gwang, but neither is extant.
Wumen guan. (J. Mumonkan; K. Mumun kwan 無門關). In Chinese, lit., "Gateless Checkpoint," or "Wumen's Checkpoint"; compiled by the CHAN master WUMEN HUIKAI, after whom the collection is named, also known as the Chanzong Wumen guan ("Gateless Checkpoint of the Chan Tradition"). Along with the BIYAN LU ("Blue Cliff Record"), the Wumen guan is considered one of the two most important GONG'AN (J. koan; K. kongan) collections of the Chan tradition. In the summer of 1228, at the request of the resident monks at the monastery of Longxiangsi, Wumen lectured on a series of forty-eight cases (gong'an) that he culled from various "transmission of the lamplight" (CHUANDENG LU) histories and the recorded sayings (YULU) of previous Chan masters. His lectures were recorded and compiled that same year and published with a preface by Wumen in the following year (1229). Another case (case 49), composed by the layman Zheng Qingzhi, was added to the Wumen guan in 1246. The Wumen guan begins with a popular case attributed to ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN, in which Zhaozhou replies "WU" (no) to the question, "Does a dog have buddha nature, or not?" (see WU GONG'AN). Wumen himself is known to have struggled with this case, which was given to him by his teacher Yuelin Shiguan (1143-1217). The Japanese monk SHINICHI KAKUSHIN, who briefly studied under Wumen in China, brought the Wumen guan to Japan. Although the collection was once declared to be heretical by the SoToSHu in the mid-seventeenth century, many Japanese commentaries on the Wumen guan were composed at the time, testifying to its growing influence during the Edo period.
Wuzhun Shifan. (J. Bujun Shihan/Bushun Shiban/Mujun Shihan; K. Mujun Sabom 無準師範) (1178-1249). Chinese CHAN master in the LINJI ZONG. After his ordination in the winter of 1194, Wuzhun studied under a series of famed Chan masters, including FOZHAO DEGUANG and Po'an Zuxian. Wuzhun eventually attained awakening under Po'an and succeeded his lineage. During his illustrious career at such important monasteries as WANSHOUSI on Mt. Jing, Wuzhun also taught the Japanese pilgrims Hoshin (d.u.), Doyu (1201-1258), and the famed ENNI BEN'EN, who is now regarded as the first exponent of ZEN in Japan. Wuzhun was later summoned by Emperor Lizong (r. 1224-1264) to provide a public lecture at the Pavilion of Benevolent Illumination in the imperial palace. The emperor later bestowed upon him the title Chan master Fojian (Buddha Mirror). Wuzhun left many famous disciples such as WUXUE ZUYUAN and Mu'an Puning, both of whom went to Kamakura in Japan and served as abbots of the powerful monastery of KENCHoJI.
Xiangmo Zang. (T. Bdud 'dul snying po; J. Goma Zo; K. Hangma Chang 降魔藏) (d.u.). In Chinese, "Demon-Subduer Zang." Chinese monk and leading disciple of the CHAN master SHENXIU, in the Northern school (BEI ZONG). At an early age, Xiangmo Zang acquired the nickname "demon-subduer" (xiangmo) by dwelling in deserted houses and open fields. Later, he learned to recite the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA and studied the VINAYA after he became a monk. He is said to have had an awakening experience after listening to a lecture on the "theories of the Southern school" (NAN ZONG lun) and, abandoning his scriptural studies, became a student of Shenxiu. As Shenxiu's disciple, Xiangmo Zang became the target of HEZE SHENHUI's polemical attack on the Northern school of Chan. Xiangmo Zang also appears in the BSAM GTAN MIG SGRON by GNUBS CHEN SANGS RGYAS YE SHES along with a certain Wolun (d.u.) and MOHEYAN and others of the Northern school, whose teachings may have exerted some influence on MAHĀYOGA in Tibet.
Yakushiji. (藥師寺). In Japanese, "Medicine Buddha Monastery." One of the seven great monasteries of Nara, Japan. Yakushiji is currently the headquarters (daihonzan) of the Hosso (C. FAXIANG ZONG) tradition. In 680, Emperor Tenmu (r. 673-686) ordered the construction of a statue of the Medicine Buddha (BHAIsAJYAGURU) and a new monastery to pray for the recovery of his ill consort, who later succeeded him as Empress Jito (r. 687-697). Due to the emperor's death and the lack of sufficient funds, construction began under Empress Jito's reign in the old capital of Fujiwarakyo in present-day Kashihara city. Construction was completed in 697, but the monastery was physically relocated to the new capital Heijokyo in 718 after the transfer of the capital in 710. The monastery originally consisted of two pagodas to the east and the west flanking a central golden hall (kondo) and a lecture hall (kodo) behind it. After a great fire in 973, only the pagodas and the golden hall remained. The hall collapsed during a typhoon in 1445 and the west pagoda was lost to fire during a war in 1528. Reconstruction of the monastery took place during most of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The golden hall houses the famed Medicine Buddha triad from the Hakuho period (645-710), now designated a national treasure.
Yang Wenhui. (J. Yo Bunkai; K. Yang Munhoe 楊文會) (1837-1911). Chinese Buddhist layman at the end of the Qing dynasty, renowned for his efforts to revitalize modern Chinese Buddhism. A native of Anhui province, Yang fled from the Taiping Rebellion to Hangzhou prefecture. In 1862, he serendipitously acquired a copy of the DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna") and became interested in Buddhism. In 1878, he traveled to England, where he served at the Chinese Embassy in London, befriending the Japanese Buddhist scholar NANJo BUN'Yu (1849-1927), who helped him to acquire Chinese Buddhist texts that had been preserved in Japan. After his return to China, Yang established a publishing press called the Jingling Kejing Chu and published more than three thousand Buddhist scriptures. In 1893, ANAGĀRIKA DHARMAPĀLA visited Yang in Shanghai. In 1894, Yang and the British missionary Timothy Richard translated the DASHENG QIXIN LUN into English. In 1907, the Jingling Kejing Chu began to publish primers of Buddhism in various languages. In 1910, Yang also founded the Fojiao Yanjiu Hui (Buddhist Research Society), where he regularly lectured until his death in 1911.
Yoga(Sanskrit) ::: Literally "union," "conjunction," etc. In India it is the technical name for one of the sixDarsanas or schools of philosophy, and its foundation is ascribed to the sage Patanjali. The name Yogaitself describes the objective of this school, the attaining of union or at-one-ness with the divine-spiritualessence within a man. The yoga practices when properly understood through the instructions of genuineteachers -- who, by the way, never announce themselves as public lecturers or through books oradvertisements -- are supposed to induce certain ecstatic states leading to a clear perception of universaltruths, and the highest of these states is called samadhi.There are a number of minor forms of yoga practice and training such as the karma yoga, hatha yoga,bhakti yoga, raja yoga, jnana yoga, etc. Similar religious aspirations or practices likewise exist inOccidental countries, as, for instance, what is called salvation by works, somewhat equivalent to theHindu karma yoga or, again, salvation by faith -- or love, somewhat similar to the Hindu bhakti yoga;while both Orient and Occident have, each one, its various forms of ascetic practices which may begrouped under the term hatha yoga.No system of yoga should ever be practiced unless under the direct teaching of one who knows thedangers of meddling with the psychomental apparatus of the human constitution, for dangers lurk atevery step, and the meddler in these things is likely to bring disaster upon himself, both in matters ofhealth and as regards sane mental equilibrium. The higher branches of yoga, however, such as the rajayoga and jnana yoga, implying strict spiritual and intellectual discipline combined with a fervid love forall beings, are perfectly safe. It is, however, the ascetic practices, etc., and the teachings that go withthem, wherein lies the danger to the unwary, and they should be carefully avoided.
Yuanming lun. (J. Enmyoron; K. Wonmyong non 圓明論). In Chinese, "Treatise on Perfect Illumination"; attributed to AsVAGHOsA, but almost certainly a transcription of a lecture by a teacher associated with the Northern school (BEI ZONG) in the nascent Chinese CHAN tradition. Several copies of this text have been discovered at DUNHUANG, and a private copy is extant in Japan. The treatise consists of nine chapters written largely in catechistic format. The treatise elucidates the causes and results of the path, the nature of the DHARMADHĀTU as the manifestation of one's own mind, false and correct views, the importance of UPĀYA, and the practice of meditation. The Yuanming lun serves as an important source on the teachings of the early Chan tradition before its coalescence around the mythology of the "sixth patriarch" (LIUZU) HUINENG and the so-called Southern school (NAN ZONG).
Yuanwu Keqin. (J. Engo Kokugon; K. Wono Kŭkkŭn 圜悟克勤) (1062-1135). Chinese CHAN master in the LINJI ZONG; also known as Wuzhuo and Foguo. Yuanwu was a native of Chongning, Pengzhou prefecture, in present-day Sichuan province (northwest of the city of Chengdu). Little is known about his early career, but Yuanwu eventually became a disciple of the Chan master WUZU FAYAN. According to legend, Yuanwu became ill after leaving Wuzu's side, and returned as Wuzu had predicted. Yuanwu then inherited Wuzu's Linji lineage. While traveling in the south, Yuanwu befriended the statesman ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1122) and also won the support of other powerful local figures, such as the governor of Chengdu. At their request, Yuanwu served as abbot of several monasteries, including Jiashansi and Daolinsi, where he lectured on the Xuedou gonggu by XUEDOU CHONGXUAN. These lectures were later edited together as the BIYAN LU ("Blue Cliff Record"), an influential collection of Chan cases (GONG'AN). Yuanwu was honored with several titles: Emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1125) gave him the title Chan master Foguo (Buddha Fruition) and Gaozong the title Chan master Yuanwu (Consummate Awakening). The title Chan master Zhenjue (True Enlightenment) was also bestowed upon him. Among his hundred or so disciples, DAHUI ZONGGAO, the systematizer of the KANHUA CHAN method of meditation, is most famous. Yuanwu's teachings are recorded in the Yuanwu Foguo chanshi yulu and Yuanwu chanshi xinyao.
Yuimae. (C. Weimo hui; K. Yuma hoe 維摩會). In Japanese, "VIMALAKĪRTI ceremony." One of the three great ceremonies (Nankyo san[n]e) held in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara. In 656, when the senior courtier Nakatomi no Kamatari (an ancestor of the Fujiwara clan) became seriously ill, the Paekche nun Pommyong (J. Homyo) advised Empress Saimei to sponsor a reading of the "Inquiry about Illness" chapter of the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA in order to speed his recovery. The reading was successful and, out of gratitude, Kamatari and his family subsequently sponsored a lecture on the sutra in 658 to commemorate the construction of the new monastery of Sankaiji. This ceremony was transferred to the Hossoshu (C. FAXIANG ZONG) monastery of KoFUKUJI in Nara in 712, where it was held periodically every two to five years; it is now observed annually on the tenth day of the tenth lunar month. For seven days, a lecture on the Vimalakīrtinirdesa is offered to the public and offerings are made to the SAMGHA.
yulu. (J. goroku; K. orok 語録). In Chinese, "discourse records" or "recorded sayings," also known as yuben (lit. "edition of discourses") or guanglu ("extensive records"); compilations of the sayings of CHAN, SoN, and ZEN masters. This genre of Chan literature typically involved collections of the formal sermons (SHANGTANG), exchanges (WENDA), and utterances of Chan masters, which were edited together by their disciples soon after their deaths. The yulu genre sought to capture the vernacular flavor of the master's speech, thus giving it a personal and intimate quality, as if the master himself were in some sense still accessible. Often the recorded sayings of a master would also include his biography, poetry, death verse (YIJI), inscriptions, letters (SHUZHUANG), and other writings, in addition to the transcription of his lectures and sayings. For this reason, Chan discourse records are the Buddhist equivalent of the literary collections (wenji) of secular literati. The term first appears in the SONG GAOSENG ZHUAN, and the genre is often associated particularly with the Chan master MAZU DAOYI (709-788) and his HONGZHOU line of Chan. Among the more famous recorded sayings are the Mazu yulu (a.k.a. Mazu Daoyi chanshi guanglu), LINJI YIXUAN's LINJI LU, and HUANGBO XIYUN's CHUANXIN FAYAO. Recorded sayings written in Japanese vernacular are also often called a hogo (dharma discourse).
Yuquansi. (玉泉寺). In Chinese, "Jade Spring Monastery"; important meditative center located on Mt. Yuquan in Jingzhou prefecture (present-day Hubei province). During the Daye reign period (605-617) of the Sui dynasty, a name plaque for the monastery was prepared by the King of Jin, and the eminent monk TIANTAI ZHIYI lectured there on his FAHUA XUANYI and MOHE ZHIGUAN. Yuquansi soon became a prominent center for meditators in China. The monastery became even more famous when the CHAN master SHENXIU of the Northern school (BEI ZONG) took up residence at the site sometime in the last quarter of the seventh century. The famed Chan master NANYUE HUAIRANG is also said to have ordained at Yuquansi.
Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb ::: (b. 1944) Bible lecturer, teacher and author; Israel.
KEYS (10k)
4 Sri Ramakrishna
2 Simone Weil
1 Marianne Williamson
1 Manly P. Hall
1 Manly P Hall
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 Jordan Peterson
1 Isabel Allende
1 G. W. F. Hegel
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
17 Anonymous
15 Rick Riordan
9 Terry Pratchett
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson
8 Henry David Thoreau
7 Walt Whitman
7 Tara Westover
7 Richelle Mead
7 Ilona Andrews
6 Swami Vivekananda
6 Randy Pausch
6 Chuck Palahniuk
5 Stephen Fry
5 Mark Twain
5 Louisa May Alcott
5 Carl Jung
5 Bob Woodward
4 Samuel Johnson
4 Chris Crutcher
4 Alfred North Whitehead
1:When we open the door we go not into a strange place but we stand in the presence of the altar of our own soul. ~ Manly P Hall, Lecture #KEYS
2:If a man could write a book on Ethics that was really a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all other books in the world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'A Lecture on Ethics' (1929), #KEYS
3:We can reach a point where our way of life again has the dignities and the values which make living important. ~ Manly P. Hall, Lecture #KEYS
4:When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture. ~ Isabel Allende, #KEYS
5:If someone fails to be angry at the things he should, he does not grieve for them and so does not feel they are evil. This pertains to a lack of wisdom ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics 4, lecture 13)., #KEYS
6:We would like to see the world around us as beautiful as we know it could be, but this cannot be achieved until the soul world within us is as beautiful as it must be to transform the outer surface of things. ~ Manly P. Hall Lecture #KEYS
7:The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.
Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up - there's a way out.
~ Stephen Hawkings,#KEYS
8: Its like the word purity - one could lecture endlessly on the difference between divine purity and what people call purity. Divine purity (at the lowest level) is to admit but one influence the divine Influence (but this is at the lowest level, and already terribly distorted). Divine purity means that only the Divine exists - nothing else. It is perfectly pure only the Divine exists, nothing other than He. And so on. ~ The Mother, Agenda Vol 02, 1961-07-07, #KEYS
9:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Harold Abelson, Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #KEYS
10:5. When in Doubt ::: Read the Syllabus - Read Ahead - Ask Questions: Read the correlated readings (designed to mesh with that lecture) before you come to class. The whole point of correlated readings is to prepare you for the lecture. If the readings are completed at the appropriate time you will have a 'Big Picture' framed by a general narrative and suspended by an ongoing line of argument. These readings should help you establish a set of expectations as well as some unsettling questions. The lectures should help you connect ideas you have read about and, with any luck, they should help you call key issues into question. Your job is to arrive at an understanding you call your own and can defend to a critical audience. Beginning to end, you are the center of your education. You know where to begin. ~ Dr Robert A Hatch, How to Study, #KEYS
11:The true Mantra must come from within OR it must be given by a Guru
Nobody can give you the true mantra. It's not something that is given; it's something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being - then it has power, because it's not something that comes from outside, it's your very own cry.
I saw, in my case, that my mantra has the power of immortality; whatever happens, if it is uttered, it's the Supreme that has the upper hand, it's no longer the lower law. And the words are irrelevant, they may not have any meaning - to someone else, my mantra is meaningless, but to me it's full, packed with meaning. And effective, because it's my cry, the intense aspiration of my whole being.
A mantra given by a guru is only the power to realize the experience of the discoverer of the mantra. The power is automatically there, because the sound contains the experience. I saw that once in Paris, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didn't even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced "yoga" for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lecture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light.... I was probably the only one to notice it. I said to myself, "Well!" Then I didn't give it any more thought, I forgot about the story. But as it happened, the experience recurred in two or three different countries, with different people, and every time there was the sound OM, I would suddenly see the place fill with that same light. So I understood. That sound contains the vibration of thousands and thousands of years of spiritual aspiration - there is in it the entire aspiration of men towards the Supreme. And the power is automatically there, because the experience is there.
It's the same with my mantra. When I wanted to translate the end of my mantra, "Glory to You, O Lord," into Sanskrit, I asked for Nolini's help. He brought his Sanskrit translation, and when he read it to me, I immediately saw that the power was there - not because Nolini put his power into it (!), God knows he had no intention of "giving" me a mantra! But the power was there because my experience was there. We made a few adjustments and modifications, and that's the japa I do now - I do it all the time, while sleeping, while walking, while eating, while working, all the time.[[Mother later clarified: "'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't MY mantra, it's something I ADDED to it - my mantra is something else altogether, that's not it. When I say that my mantra has the power of immortality, I mean the other, the one I don't speak of! I have never given the words.... You see, at the end of my walk, a kind of enthusiasm rises, and with that enthusiasm, the 'Glory to You' came to me, but it's part of the prayer I had written in Prayers and Meditations: 'Glory to You, O Lord, all-triumphant Supreme' etc. (it's a long prayer). It came back suddenly, and as it came back spontaneously, I kept it. Moreover, when Sri Aurobindo read this prayer in Prayers and Meditations, he told me it was very strong. So I added this phrase as a kind of tail to my japa. But 'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't my spontaneous mantra - it came spontaneously, but it was something written very long ago. The two things are different."
And that's how a mantra has life: when it wells up all the time, spontaneously, like the cry of your being - there is no need of effort or concentration: it's your natural cry. Then it has full power, it is alive. It must well up from within.... No guru can give you that. ~ The Mother, Agenda, May 11 1963,#KEYS
12:Of course we do." Dresden's voice was cutting. "But you're thinking too small. Building humanity's greatest empire is like building the world's largest anthill. Insignificant. There is a civilization out there that built the protomolecule and hurled it at us over two billion years ago. They were already gods at that point. What have they become since then? With another two billion years to advance?"
With a growing dread, Holden listened to Dresden speak. This speech had the air of something spoken before. Perhaps many times. And it had worked. It had convinced powerful people. It was why Protogen had stealth ships from the Earth shipyards and seemingly limitless behind-the-scenes support.
"We have a terrifying amount of catching up to do, gentlemen," Dresden was saying. "But fortunately we have the tool of our enemy to use in doing it."
"Catching up?" a soldier to Holden's left said. Dresden nodded at the man and smiled.
"The protomolecule can alter the host organism at the molecular level; it can create genetic change on the fly. Not just DNA, but any stable replicatoR But it is only a machine. It doesn't think. It follows instructions. If we learn how to alter that programming, then we become the architects of that change."
Holden interrupted. "If it was supposed to wipe out life on Earth and replace it with whatever the protomolecule's creators wanted, why turn it loose?"
"Excellent question," Dresden said, holding up one finger like a college professor about to deliver a lecture. "The protomolecule doesn't come with a user's manual. In fact, we've never before been able to actually watch it carry out its program. The molecule requires significant mass before it develops enough processing power to fulfill its directives. Whatever they are."
Dresden pointed at the screens covered with data around them.
"We are going to watch it at work. See what it intends to do. How it goes about doing it. And, hopefully, learn how to change that program in the process."
"You could do that with a vat of bacteria," Holden said.
"I'm not interested in remaking bacteria," Dresden said.
"You're fucking insane," Amos said, and took another step toward Dresden. Holden put a hand on the big mechanic's shoulder.
"So," Holden said. "You figure out how the bug works, and then what?"
"Then everything. Belters who can work outside a ship without wearing a suit. Humans capable of sleeping for hundreds of years at a time flying colony ships to the stars. No longer being bound to the millions of years of evolution inside one atmosphere of pressure at one g, slaves to oxygen and water. We decide what we want to be, and we reprogram ourselves to be that. That's what the protomolecule gives us."
Dresden had stood back up as he'd delivered this speech, his face shining with the zeal of a prophet.
"What we are doing is the best and only hope of humanity's survival. When we go out there, we will be facing gods."
"And if we don't go out?" Fred asked. He sounded thoughtful.
"They've already fired a doomsday weapon at us once," Dresden said.
The room was silent for a moment. Holden felt his certainty slip. He hated everything about Dresden's argument, but he couldn't quite see his way past it. He knew in his bones that something about it was dead wrong, but he couldn't find the words. Naomi's voice startled him.
"Did it convince them?" she asked.
"Excuse me?" Dresden said.
"The scientists. The technicians. Everyone you needed to make it happen. They actually had to do this. They had to watch the video of people dying all over Eros. They had to design those radioactive murder chambers. So unless you managed to round up every serial killer in the solar system and send them through a postgraduate program, how did you do this?"
"We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints."
Half a dozen clues clicked into place in Holden's head. ~ James S A Corey, Leviathan Wakes,#KEYS
13:One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, was drawn by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story.
As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing --specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does', the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling --which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos': and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.
It is, no doubt, possible to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,--if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,--that I could 'fulfil my task,' and produce my 'tale of bricks,' as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced--that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!
This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of 'padding' which might fitly be defined as 'that which all can write and none can read.' That the present volume contains no such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines : but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do.
My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of 'padding' it contains. While arranging the 'slips' into pages, I found that the passage was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess which they are?
A harder puzzle if a harder be desired would be to determine, as to the Gardener's Song, in which cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in which (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza.
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come's is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story--I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it--but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'--is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
Hence it is that, in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' I have striven with I know not what success to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.
If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written--which I should much like to attempt, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through--in the hope that, if I should fail (and the years are gliding away very fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.
First, a Child's Bible. The only real essentials of this would be, carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love--no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great difficulty: no new ones would be needed : hundreds of excellent pictures already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size with a pretty attractive looking cover--in a clear legible type--and, above all, with abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!
Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible--not single texts, but passages of from 10 to 20 verses each--to be committed to memory. Such passages would be found useful, to repeat to one's self and to ponder over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible: for instance, when lying awake at night--on a railway-journey --when taking a solitary walk-in old age, when eyesight is failing or wholly lost--and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of David's rapturous cry "O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth!"
I have said 'passages,' rather than single texts, because we have no means of recalling single texts: memory needs links, and here are none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen--and those by mere chance: whereas, once get hold of any portion of a chapter that has been committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.
Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages--enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.
These two books of sacred, and secular, passages for memory--will serve other good purposes besides merely occupying vacant hours: they will help to keep at bay many anxious thoughts, worrying thoughts, uncharitable thoughts, unholy thoughts. Let me say this, in better words than my own, by copying a passage from that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX. "If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images, which will generally be at periodical hours, let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy, suicidal thoughts, beset him. Let these be to him the sword, turning everywhere to keep the way of the Garden of Life from the intrusion of profaner footsteps."
Fourthly, a "Shakespeare" for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. Few children under 10 would be likely to understand or enjoy the greatest of poets: and those, who have passed out of girlhood, may safely be left to read Shakespeare, in any edition, 'expurgated' or not, that they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children, in the intermediate stage, should be debarred from a great pleasure for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated.' Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out! Besides relentlessly erasing all that is unsuitable on the score of reverence or decency, I should be inclined to omit also all that seems too difficult, or not likely to interest young readers. The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry.
If it be needful to apologize to any one for the new departure I have taken in this story--by introducing, along with what will, I hope, prove to be acceptable nonsense for children, some of the graver thoughts of human life--it must be to one who has learned the Art of keeping such thoughts wholly at a distance in hours of mirth and careless ease. To him such a mixture will seem, no doubt, ill-judged and repulsive. And that such an Art exists I do not dispute: with youth, good health, and sufficient money, it seems quite possible to lead, for years together, a life of unmixed gaiety--with the exception of one solemn fact, with which we are liable to be confronted at any moment, even in the midst of the most brilliant company or the most sparkling entertainment. A man may fix his own times for admitting serious thought, for attending public worship, for prayer, for reading the Bible: all such matters he can defer to that 'convenient season', which is so apt never to occur at all: but he cannot defer, for one single moment, the necessity of attending to a message, which may come before he has finished reading this page,' this night shalt thy soul be required of thee.'
The ever-present sense of this grim possibility has been, in all ages, 1 an incubus that men have striven to shake off. Few more interesting subjects of enquiry could be found, by a student of history, than the various weapons that have been used against this shadowy foe. Saddest of all must have been the thoughts of those who saw indeed an existence beyond the grave, but an existence far more terrible than annihilation--an existence as filmy, impalpable, all but invisible spectres, drifting about, through endless ages, in a world of shadows, with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to love! In the midst of the gay verses of that genial 'bon vivant' Horace, there stands one dreary word whose utter sadness goes to one's heart. It is the word 'exilium' in the well-known passage
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura et nos in aeternum
Exilium impositura cymbae.
Yes, to him this present life--spite of all its weariness and all its sorrow--was the only life worth having: all else was 'exile'! Does it not seem almost incredible that one, holding such a creed, should ever have smiled?
And many in this day, I fear, even though believing in an existence beyond the grave far more real than Horace ever dreamed of, yet regard it as a sort of 'exile' from all the joys of life, and so adopt Horace's theory, and say 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'
We go to entertainments, such as the theatre--I say 'we', for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one and keep at arm's length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know--dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface that it may not be your lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis--to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you to hear their troubled whispers perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, "Is it serious?", and to be told "Yes: the end is near" (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)--how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?
And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself "Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too 'risky', the dialogue a little too strong, the 'business' a little too suggestive.
I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow." To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!
"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'
Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for 'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger.
But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine 'Sport': I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some 'man-eating' tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those 'tender and delicate' beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love--'thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'--whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!
'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:When you speak, ask questions. Don't lecture. ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 2:A suffering person does not need a lecture - he needs a listener. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 3:I will gladly lecture for fifty dollars, but I'll not be a guest for less than a hundred. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 4:To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 5:A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 6:I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 7:I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can't be made to do it in any possible way. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 8:The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 9:Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!" ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 10:You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 11:We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 12:I'll go to a city, a school, and give a lecture because I can feel someone there. I inwardly see first their is someone there who is waiting. Where they'll show up or not, I don't know. That depneds upon many factors. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 13:Give a lecture to a thousand people.One walks out and says,I'm going to change my life." Another one walks out with a yawn and says,"I've heard all this before."Why is that? Why wouldn't both be affected the same way?Another mystery." ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 14:It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 15:I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 16:I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, "I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder." ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 17:If you were to show me your current financial plan, would I get so excited by it that I would go across the country and lecture on it? If the answer is no, then here's my question: Why not?’ Why wouldn't you have a superior financial plan that is taking you to the places you want to go? ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 18:You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 19:I don't want to give a lecture to this body that's out there. You know, I mean, having had the heart attack, I want to get it back functioning. And as a practical matter, I mean if you were Bear Stearns, and you were a shareholder, you know, you lost 90 to 95 percent of your money. A good many lost their jobs. They lost very cushy lives, many of them. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 20:Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 21:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever, " said the old lady. "But it turtles all the way down! ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:It's useless to lecture a human. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
2:La lecture est un rêve libre ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
3:Dad hit lecture mode from word one. ~ Devon Monk, #NFDB
4:La lecture est un rêve libre. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
5:Lyrical lecture, word architecture, ~ Lord Finesse, #NFDB
6:My parents never really lecture me. ~ Georgia May Jagger, #NFDB
7:Lire c’est errer. La lecture est l’errance. ~ Pascal Quignard, #NFDB
8:A watch is the most essential part of a lecture. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
9:CHAPTER LXXVIII THE SENATOR’S LECTURE.—NO. II ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
10:La lecture agrandit l'âme, et un ami éclairé la console. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
11:We don't want to go to a movie and sit in a lecture. ~ Jeremy Renner, #NFDB
12:The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation. ~ James Lileks, #NFDB
13:Anyone can lecture from the butt; only very few can act. ~ Pawan Mishra, #NFDB
14:Hahahaha, so watching him giving a lecture is an aphrodisiac? ~ Ika Natassa, #NFDB
15:The place went on forever-like Costco or a chemistry lecture. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
16:If great lecture is theatre, the future of learning is games. ~ Anant Agarwal, #NFDB
17:I went to a lecture of [Arthur Koestler ] once, I never met him. ~ Nat Hentoff, #NFDB
18:A suffering person does not need a lecture - he needs a listener. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
19:A lecture is an occasion when you numb one end to benefit the other. ~ John Gould, #NFDB
20:Important lecture!' cried Pnin. 'What to do? It is a catastroph! ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
21:I don't lecture and I don't grind any axes. I just want to entertain. ~ Gregory Peck, #NFDB
22:Failure is not just acceptable, it's often essential." The Last Lecture ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
23:Dude did you come here to lecture or to fight? BRING IT ON." -Slam Dunk ~ Takehiko Inoue, #NFDB
24:Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." The Last Lecture ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
25:Dude did you come here to lecture or to fight? BRING IT ON."
-Slam Dunk ~ Takehiko Inoue,#NFDB
26:The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave. ~ William James, #NFDB
27:Religion is poetry misunderstood. ~ Joseph Campbell, “Mythology and the Individual,” Lecture 4, #NFDB
28:A sex lecture from two citizens... it was worth it to get that kiss from you. ~ Kathleen Brooks, #NFDB
29:I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent. ~ Bill Ayers, #NFDB
30:Paris est la grande salle de lecture d’une bibliothèque que traverse la Seine. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
31:Lecture your children every day. You may not know what they did wrong, but they do! ~ Joanne Fluke, #NFDB
32:His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far? ~ Dag Hammarskj ld,#NFDB
33:A sex lecture from two senior citizens... it was worth it to get that kiss from you. ~ Kathleen Brooks, #NFDB
34:Well, hey there, Pot. Why don't you go lecture Kettle some more about how not to be cookware. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
35:Getting a lecture on restraint from the woman who threw a hissy fit and blew up Babylon. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
36:La lecture est comme une drogue qui confère un agréable flou au cruels contours de la vie. ~ Imre Kert sz, #NFDB
37:The first lecture of each new year renews for most people a light stage fright. ~ John Edensor Littlewood, #NFDB
38:I do sometimes lecture people about what they’re eating, but that’s only if they ask me. ~ Woody Harrelson, #NFDB
39:I will gladly lecture for fifty dollars, but I'll not be a guest for less than a hundred. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
40:Et si je suis un homme ayant quelque lecture, je suis un homme qui n’en retient rien. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
41:Look, if I'd wanted a lecture on the rights of man, I'd have gone to bed with Martin Luther. ~ Rowan Atkinson, #NFDB
42:Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity. ~ Max Weber, #NFDB
43:You rarely get a convincing lecture on playing to your strength from a bald guy with a ponytail. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
44:He shook his head and looked away, as if he was giving himself a firm lecture only he could here. ~ Roni Loren, #NFDB
45:What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
46:When you let excitement in, Johnny would add, in a lecture-room sort of voice, fear will follow. ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
47:According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
48:Going to a party, for me, is as much a learning experience as, you know, sitting in a lecture. ~ Natalie Portman, #NFDB
49:It's not about the cards you're dealt, but how you play the hand. - Randy Pausch “The Last Lecture ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
50:well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
51:The Americans lecture the world on democracy and then won’t let me turn the traction control off! ~ Jeremy Clarkson, #NFDB
52:We teach reading, writing and math by [having students do] them. But we teach democracy by lecture. ~ Shelley Berman, #NFDB
53:Agassiz would not lecture at five hundred dollars a night, because he had no time to make money. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
54:I've seen enough killing in my life. I know how precious human life is and I don't need a lecture from you. ~ John McCain, #NFDB
55:My mother has always had an ability to deliver an entire lecture with a single glance. I get the glance. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
56:To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
57:every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture--from him, of course. ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
58:A chaque instant je puis m'éveiller et je le sais; mais je ne le veux pas: la lecture est un rêve libre. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
59:Vitellius would've given Percy an hour-long lecture on the subject, probably with a PowerPoint presentation. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
60:No one can teach us the joy of living; we are endowed with it. So why are we continually waiting for the lecture? ~ Dee Hock, #NFDB
61:if a lecture was not interesting or proceeded too slowly or too quickly, they would jeer and become rowdy. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
62:If I didn’t care about your virtue so much, I’d actually probably give him a lecture on how to try something. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
63:Lecture is the transfer of the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through either. ~ Eric Mazur, #NFDB
64:How is Hillary Clinton going to lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck. ~ Marco Rubio, #NFDB
65:Rosa!" Sally says. "The police are here to help you, not to hear a lecture on comparative murder rates. ~ Justine Larbalestier, #NFDB
66:Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture. ~ Michael Caine, #NFDB
67:Vivre sans lecture c'est dangereux, il faut se contenter de la vie, ça peut amener à prendre des risques. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
68:You lecture me, Mr Crawford?’
‘I,’ said the comte de Sevigny, ‘am attempting to offer you foodstuffs. ~ Dorothy Dunnett,#NFDB
69:A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
70:His hand squeezes my waist and he eyes me hard. “Fallon.” He says my name like it’s an entire lecture in itself. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
71:Is there a cookie at the end of this lecture? ... I got a cookie after all ... Dear god, the cookie was poisoned. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
72:a noted academic had said at a lecture last year. The dawning of a new age. There was always a new age dawning. ~ Elizabeth Strout, #NFDB
73:Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1 ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
74:Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism. ~ Hari Kunzru, #NFDB
75:If I’d known a lecture was coming, I’d have kept my mouth shut.” “Coming to terms with life as an adolescent, are you? ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
76:They told me that "with age comes wisdom", but all I got was hemorrhoids."
- Lecture tour for "Steal This Urine Test ~ Abbie Hoffman,#NFDB
77:watch a videocassette lecture series by Dr. R. C. Sproul on the holiness of God. All I knew about Sproul was that he ~ Charles W Colson, #NFDB
78:She mesmerized lecture halls of students with her drama and passion, with ideas critics called daring and groundbreaking. ~ Jandy Nelson, #NFDB
79:When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read. ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
80:Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
81:not have noticed my fidgeting. His ignorance of it will make it easier to appease mother during her lecture. But it's hard ~ Janeal Falor, #NFDB
82:Having George W. Bush giving a lecture on business ethics is like having a leper give you a facial, it just doesn't work! ~ Robin Williams, #NFDB
83:Silence between teachers’ remarks is a very important part of a lecture. Silence provides time for consolidation and thought. ~ Scott Berkun, #NFDB
84:We will sit here and drink coffee, and you shall all three listen to Hercule Poirot while he gives you a lecture on crime. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
85:La personne, homme ou femme, qui n'éprouve pas de plaisir à la lecture d'un bon roman ne peut qu'être d'une bêtise intolérable. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
86:Today at 11amET, Join this wonderful meditation and lecture with #SantRainderSingh ~ #FF @SOSmeditate #spiritchat twitter.com/SOSmeditate/st…, #NFDB
87:Information can get from a professors lecture notes and into a student's notebook without passing through the mind of either. ~ Douglas Wilson, #NFDB
88:Dossie, giving a lecture on consent to about two hundred people, asked those who had never been sexually assaulted to stand up. ~ Dossie Easton, #NFDB
89:I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world. ~ Ken Livingstone, #NFDB
90:And he couldn't handle spending another two-hour lecture glued to his spot behind the podium in order to hide his dam*ed erection. ~ Shelly Bell, #NFDB
91:Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level. ~ Enrico Fermi, #NFDB
92:I'm quick enough to criticize and lecture the poor man. Praise should be just as quick to come when the right course is chosen. ~ Tracie Peterson, #NFDB
93:I remember,” someone said, “how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content. ~ Charles Simic, #NFDB
94:Join Fellow Jung enthusiasts for a wine tasting and lecture on Dionysus ~ the ecstasy of Pleasure!! cgjungwine2015.eventzilla.net/web/event?even…, #NFDB
95:Let me tell you, nothing puts you off your bar-food nachos quicker than a lecture on the color and consistency of slug secretions. ~ Lisa Shearin, #NFDB
96:Teacher: Tomorrow there will be a lecture on Pluto and Neptune. Everyone must attend it. Student: Sorry, my mom won't let me go so far. ~ Various, #NFDB
97:Most people today couldn't tell a bombardier from a brigadier" - said during a lecture in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund in 2009 ~ Richard Holmes, #NFDB
98:One does not simply ring Roland."
Oh boy. I supposed I would get a lecture on the dangers of wandering into Mordor next. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
99:People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count. ~ Ben Elton, #NFDB
100:The ego changes all the time, it has every kind of illusion, but the Self is as it is, there is nothing we can alter in it. ~ Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, #NFDB
101:You can't just lecture the poor that they shouldn't riot or go to extremes. You have to make the means of legal redress available. ~ Harold H Greene, #NFDB
102:[Dea07] J. Dean, “Software Engineering Advice from Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems”, Stanford CS297 class lecture, Spring 2007. ~ Betsy Beyer, #NFDB
103:A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
104:I didn’t come here to talk politics with you, baby ,” Brady said, pushing the door closed behind them. “Lecture me after I’m done with you. ~ K A Linde, #NFDB
105:Japan has more specialists of Immanuel Kant than Germany does
[RIS 2016 Lecture on A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World] ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr,#NFDB
106:She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
107:I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
108:The patience and the humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
109:Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all. ~ Stephen Leacock, #NFDB
110:You can only fight one man at a time with a sword, but, with a pen, you can compose a lecture to bore legions of enemy troops to death. ~ Lindsay Buroker, #NFDB
111:A helpful lecture about how anger 'hurts us more than anyone else' would have sent her screaming off into the woods, vampires be damned. ~ Caroline Hanson, #NFDB
112:By the time the lecture ended and the audience awoke, she had built up a splendid fortune for herself (not the first founded on paper)… ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
113:College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
114:I do not lose documents,” she said. “And do not lecture me, Mr. Neyt, on techniques. Your agency’s professionalism is no better than ours. ~ Jason Matthews, #NFDB
115:I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
116:Endured a lecture on the Nine Worlds given by some fossilized thane named Snorti. (Might be Snorri? So boring, I almost started snorri-ing….) ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
117:middle of Mr. Belford’s lecture on Plate Tectonics. People stared at me like I was a freak, which is understandable. I mean, only a freak ~ Jessica Sorensen, #NFDB
118:The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
119:I knew for sure that I didn’t want the lecture to focus on my cancer. My medical saga was what it was, and I’d already been over it and over it. ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
120:I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now. ~ John Edensor Littlewood, #NFDB
121:A smooth lecture... may be pleasant; a good teacher challenges, asks, irritates and maintains high standards - all that is generally not pleasant. ~ Paul Halmos, #NFDB
122:I would love to lecture to women on men. I'd tell them everything about men: gay, straight, bi, how we're all the same, how we're all bastards. ~ John Barrowman, #NFDB
123:To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. ~ William Ralph Inge, The Idea of Progress, Romanes Lecture (1920), #NFDB
124:I never thought that someone would be teaching one of my fanzines. I never thought I'd be off to lecture at a college. It's still shocking to me. ~ Kathleen Hanna, #NFDB
125:Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
126:I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
127:I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can't be made to do it in any possible way. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
128:Tony looked at me with the long-suffering patience of an adult child who knew an educational lecture was coming and there was no way to escape. “One ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
129:I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now. ~ John Edensor Littlewood, #NFDB
130:Irish girls, red hair,' I replied, remembering a picture of them from Mrs. Casnoff's 'People Who Want to Kill Us All' lecture at Hex Hall last year. ~ Rachel Hawkins, #NFDB
131:Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
132:This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. ~ V S Naipaul, #NFDB
133:We wear the global sweat of women and girls on our bodies" - Angela Davis, lecture at UC Davis, Sponsored by the Women's Resources and Research Center ~ Angela Y Davis, #NFDB
134:September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
135:Lecture all you want, you picked me up when I was down and I guess I owe you that, but don’t tell me about pain. Nobody knows unless they’re on the inside. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
136:So, I am independently well-off and don't have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments. ~ Uri Geller, #NFDB
137:Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
138:They might indeed be inspired, momentarily, but after the lecture, they were still stuck in their old negative worldview. The new ideas just wouldn’t take. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
139:Everything had been a battle of wills, an opportunity for him to lecture her, another reason for him to correct her faulty logic or lack of information. ~ Stephen McCauley, #NFDB
140:It's easier to lecture women on sexual morality than it is to explain why all Americans shouldn't have comprehensive, fair, and equal health care coverage. ~ Martha Plimpton, #NFDB
141:The ability to accessorize is what elevates us from lower-life forms," I said in my lecture voice, choosing a pair of diamond-studded drops for my ear. "Like men. ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
142:A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either. ~ Mortimer Adler, #NFDB
143:A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either. ~ Mortimer J Adler, #NFDB
144:As one gets older, it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon. ~ Rudolf Arnheim, #NFDB
145:They slipped quietly away while Heather continued her lecture, her eyes half-closed so that she could better enjoy the sound of her own voice, which went on and on. ~ M C Beaton, #NFDB
146:Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity. ~ Horace Mann, Lectures and Reports on Education, Lecture 1., #NFDB
147:Teaching is different today. Teachers don’t just stand at the board and lecture while the kids take notes. What we’re ultimately teaching them is to teach themselves. ~ Tony Danza, #NFDB
148:The atmosphere of libraries, lecture rooms and laboratories is dangerous to those who shut themselves up in them too long. It separates us from reality like a fog. ~ Alexis Carrel, #NFDB
149:The philosopher's lecture room is a 'hospital': you ought not to walk out of it in a state of pleasure, but in pain; for you are not in good condition when you arrive. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
150:The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
151:I may deserve your disappointment as well as a lecture and strict discipline, but what I need is your understanding, your guidance, and your unconditional love. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
152:Every weekend, I would get the drunk driving lecture. Of course, Dad drank and drove all the time. I guess it wasn't a lecture; it was helpful tips from the master. ~ Christopher Titus, #NFDB
153:At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.' ~ Robert Cialdini, #NFDB
154:If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that. ~ Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship (1840), Lecture II., #NFDB
155:No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."
(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003) ~ David McCullough,#NFDB
156:Too often we parents make assumptions about our children’s actions and motives. We lecture instead of listening. We always have an answer, instead of stopping to listen.2 ~ Tricia Goyer, #NFDB
157:Michael looked over his shoulder from his seat below me. “Beau will give you the full lecture, but I’ll just say this: if you hurt my sister, I’ll help him hide your body. ~ Devney Perry, #NFDB
158:The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
159:Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!" ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
160:Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas. ~ Robert B Laughlin, #NFDB
161:Whether it be a lecture, or a power point, it involves talking at the students. While that is commonly viewed as the quickest and easiest way to impart knowledge and skills, we ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
162:Dad followed his I’m-So-Disappointed speech with a lecture on career opportunities.
“You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing? ~ David Sedaris,#NFDB
163:People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
164:The lecture is never over. Education is not a preparation for life, my young friends, education is life. Now take what I've taught you and get out there and do some serious good. ~ Tim Downs, #NFDB
165:Wrinkles are beautiful.” Ginia hit full lecture mode in three words. “They show where your face has been and the interesting life you’ve lived. You should be proud of them. ~ Debora Geary, #NFDB
166:Of this little lecture I had missed the opening sentences. I gathered in the end not only that the poet incapable of distinguishing between beauty and ugliness was Victor Hugo ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
167:When you’re a woman in a man’s world, then you can lecture me on how I should do my job. Until then, I have the vagina and you have the penis. You have the advantage. Always. ~ Lani Lynn Vale, #NFDB
168:You cannot lecture another people about what you think is right or wrong based on your value system unless you're willing to accept others imposing their value system on you. ~ Adel al Jubeir, #NFDB
169:No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose. ~ Scott Berkun, #NFDB
170:Poor Mr. Smith, having been so rudely dragged from his high horse, was never able to mount it again, and completed the lecture in a manner not at all comfortable to himself. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
171:Well. On which aspect of our ill-advised doings are we about to lecture each other? I have very little to say. As I recall, I exhausted the matter on several other occasions. ~ Dorothy Dunnett, #NFDB
172:Men, the philosopher’s lecture-hall is a hospital—you shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it.” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.23.30 ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
173:Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
174:At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs - Anaïs - Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees." ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
175:The more content you try to capture during a lecture or a meeting, the less you're thinking about what's being said. You burn through most of your attention parroting the source. ~ Ryder Carroll, #NFDB
176:If you’ve hurt him –’ ‘Hurt him? Not at all! I imagine he’s in school right now, listening to some boring lecture, or writing an essay, or whatever dreary work mortal teenagers do. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
177:Life with a scientist who is often changing jobs and is frequently away at meetings and on lecture tours is not easy. Without a secure home base, I could not have made much progress. ~ John Pople, #NFDB
178:One day [Kahn] walked into a classroom and began a lecture with the words: "Light ... is." There followed a pause that seemed seven days long, just long enough to re-create the world. ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
179:You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
180:Sarah’s entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say “hi” to her. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
181:As you are entered with the class of Nat. philosophy, give to it the hours of lecture, but devote all your other time to Mathematics, avoiding company as the bane of all progress. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
182:Everyone who deals with teens seems to agree that the most important and toughest job is staying in connection and conversation ... not delivering a lecture but saying what we think. ~ Ellen Goodman, #NFDB
183:I didn’t want to hear his lecture about how the ancients had actually sweetened and flavored synthetic rubber and chewed it. Chewing the same stuff that you put on groundcar tires? ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
184:This morning’s lecture was on how to avoid ninjas, which might have been interesting if step one hadn’t been “Stay out of Japan.” Furthermore, Crandall had quickly become sidetracked, ~ Stuart Gibbs, #NFDB
185:If you’ve hurt him –’ ‘Hurt him? Not at all! I imagine he’s in school right now, listening to some boring lecture, or writing an essay, or whatever dreary work mortal teenagers do. The ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
186:Knowledge is not imposing. Knowledge is fun. Anyone, given time and inclination, can acquire it. Don't only lecture, but continue to learn, because there is always much more than you know. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
187:I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don't buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman. ~ John D MacDonald, #NFDB
188:Comedy can reach many more people than, say, a serious lecture on the topic. And comedy might just be the access point to reach people who want to be entertained and also learn something. ~ Aasif Mandvi, #NFDB
189:We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that ~ Jonas Salk, #NFDB
190:Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
191:Well, the Dean has asked me to speak on "The Role of Logic in Human Affairs". Of course, if I take the injunction literally you shall hear the shortest lecture in recorded history! ~ Apostolos K Doxiadis, #NFDB
192:ACADEMIC CHAIRS ARE MANY, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
193:Education is one of the blessings of life — and one of its necessities. ~ Malala Yousafzai, Nobel lecture during the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony at the City Hall in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2014, #NFDB
194:One of our professors described a lecture as 'a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either'. ~ John Cleese, #NFDB
195:And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant--how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned. ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
196:Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion. ~ Betty Smith, #NFDB
197:Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
198:He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw until she thought he would break a tooth. No doubt he was giving himself a very intense lecture on inappropriate thoughts during lifesaving moments. ~ Jacquelyn Frank, #NFDB
199:To theology, … only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), Lecture 2, p. 11., #NFDB
200:If for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
201:It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds—Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
202:Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Fugitive Slave Law, a lecture in New York City (7 March 1854), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904), #NFDB
203:I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
204:Since the human mind and auditory system work at several times the rate at which most people speak, as much as 70 percent or 80 percent of the mental time spent listening to a lecture is down time. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
205:All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men. ~ Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship (1840), Lecture V., #NFDB
206:Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people. ~ Rowan Atkinson, #NFDB
207:We do not stop to think that nothing would exist, there would be no culture in the world, if it were not for active imagination; it is always the forerunner, everything springs from it. ~ Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, #NFDB
208:Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions. ~ Derek Bok, #NFDB
209:When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it. ~ Howard Barker, #NFDB
210:We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any. ~ John Holt, #NFDB
211:My dad's cool with that kind of stuff. He always wanted me to do my best. I'm quite dyslexic in school. My dad let me figure out what I wanted to do on my own. My parents never really lecture me. ~ Georgia May Jagger, #NFDB
212:She sounded just like my mother, and I knew that if I didn’t interrupt, the lecture would escalate until I wanted to slit my wrists just to give her something to mop so she would. Stop. Talking. ~ Lesley Nneka Arimah, #NFDB
213:That was the reason parents paid for Berkeley, because the teachers were leaders in their fields: the people who composed the lecture vids everyone else watched rather than public school preceptors. ~ Katharine McGee, #NFDB
214:When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
215:First and foremost, I'm a journalist. My business is the truth. Now, I happen to be other things, too - a pop-culture phenomenon, the most in-demand speaker on the campus lecture circuit, whatever. ~ Milo Yiannopoulos, #NFDB
216:The kind of lecture which I have been so kindly invited to give, and which now appears in book form, gives one a rare opportunity to allow the bees in one's bonnet to buzz even more noisily than usual. ~ Hermann Bondi, #NFDB
217:(About The Last Lecture) It's not about how to achieve your dreams. It's about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you. ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
218:Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best;
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
219:We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
220:She is more memory than reality. She belongs to a time of teenage crushes, first kisses, crowded lecture halls and smoky pubs. Even if she had lived, we might have had nothing in common except the past. ~ Michael Robotham, #NFDB
221:I remember a lecture from one of my lit classes about a theory called "Reader Response", which basically says: More often than not, it's the readers --- not the writers --- who determine what a book means. ~ Kelly Corrigan, #NFDB
222:While it might be fashionable for a lady to attend a publuc lecture on the afterlife, or participate in a seance from time to time, claiming to have seen a ghost yourself does not go down well in polite circles. ~ Ami McKay, #NFDB
223:I was giving a lecture and I said, that's enough about The Photographic Life, meaning my biography, now let's talk about the life of a photograph. And in that one instant I got the title for a potential next book. ~ Sam Abell, #NFDB
224:Say ‘pop.’ ”
“Pop?”
“That was the sound of me pulling your head out of your ass. If you stick it back up there again, there is nothing I can do about it. This is the only lecture you’ll ever get from me. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
225:Les livres sont des barils de brut. En eux, dort la pensée. Elle est contenue entre les feuilles comme les hydrocarbures entre les strates. Pour se libérer, la force des mots attend le raffinage de la lecture. ~ Sylvain Tesson, #NFDB
226:As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns. ~ Joseph Stiglitz, #NFDB
227:I gave myself a stern lecture, told myself to buck up, play the man, be a mensch, do what must be done, and after several similar clichés I began to believe I could do it, but the thought of it still tickled at me. ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
228:The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist. ~ Jerry A Coyne, #NFDB
229:I attended a lecture by a gray-haired old man from Finland, who later I discovered was the architect Alvar Aalto. I was very moved. I wasn't interested in architecture, but it was a moving thing I've never forgotten. ~ Frank Gehry, #NFDB
230:My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum. ~ Mary MacLane, #NFDB
231:The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath. ~ John Green, #NFDB
232:I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically. ~ William H Gass, #NFDB
233:Nothing remains, under God, but those passions which have often proved the best ministers of His vengeance, and the surest protectors of the world. ~ Lecture XXVIL: On Habit - Part II, in “Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy”, , #NFDB
234:This Saturday? As in tomorrow Saturday? We have to give lectures in twelve hours? We're not prepared for that! I can't just pull a cyber-crimes lecture out of my ass!" He could, but it was the principle of the thing. ~ Abigail Roux, #NFDB
235:You will also allow me to thank the Academy for inviting me to lecture in Stockholm, for its hospitality, and for the opportunity afforded me for admiring the charm of your people and the beauty of your country. ~ Guglielmo Marconi, #NFDB
236:We must waive the lecture and embrace listening. What are they actually saying? What is confusing to them? What do they think? Where is the rub? Let's hear them, then engage them... Kids want to be mentored, not ruled. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
237:I'll go to a city, a school, and give a lecture because I can feel someone there. I inwardly see first their is someone there who is waiting. Where they'll show up or not, I don't know. That depneds upon many factors. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
238:The structure of the Swiss ruling class is rock-hard, and unchanged since the time of Napoleon. They sit on their mountains and lecture the world on democracy. It's an unbelievable show of self-satisfaction and arrogance. ~ Jean Ziegler, #NFDB
239:No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his "philosophy of life" until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
240:I would say just stop watching me, I guess, at this point. That is what I do, and it probably is, in some way, a bit of a lecture. I can see how that's not something that would be enticing for you to watch in a stand-up hour. ~ David Cross, #NFDB
241:I’d been wondering whether something was wrong with me since the beginning of the semester, when I’d attended my first lecture on world affairs. I’d been wondering how I could be a woman and yet be drawn to unwomanly things. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
242:A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
243:This is a trap. If I say, Oh, yeah, I roll rubbers onto new dry erections all the time, I’ll get the slut lecture from my father. But if I tell them, No, we’ll get to spend Christmas Day practicing to protect me from fruit. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
244:I call it Andskoti, the Adversary. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds—Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
245:My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
246:You don't know this, 'cause you're too young," came the usual lecture, "but politicians run all the big scams. Government's the thief of all time. That's why it tries so hard to catch thieves—it doesn't like the competition. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
247:A classic lecture, rich in sentiment, With scraps of thundrous Epic lilted out By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long, That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
248:In his 1865 lecture on “Value, Price and Profit,” Marx illustrated luxury consumption as money “wasted on flunkeys, horses, cats and so forth.” It is some measure of progress that the general population can now afford to keep cats. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
249:The first way has been excellently presented by David Holt in his lecture on “Jung and Marx.” [1] There Holt shows that Jung imagined his work to be theoretically and historically substantiated by alchemy, and that Jung spent a ~ James Hillman, #NFDB
250:"Via ovicipitum dura est," or, for the benefit of the engineers among you: "The way of the egghead is hard." ~ Adlai Stevenson, lecture at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 17, 1954. Stevenson, Call to Greatness, p. xi (1954)., #NFDB
251:When a well-rounded character takes over, he doesn't lecture you about his history and how he is misunderstood. He lives his life, does things that are unexpected, and makes you laugh and cry because of his human flaws and foibles. ~ Andrew Lam, #NFDB
252:Give a lecture to a thousand people.One walks out and says,I'm going to change my life." Another one walks out with a yawn and says,"I've heard all this before."Why is that? Why wouldn't both be affected the same way?Another mystery." ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
253:The devotion to God as seen in every religion is divided into two parts: the devotion which works through forms and ceremonies and through words, and that which works through love. (Notes from a lecture Lessons on Bhakti yoga) ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
254:Experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? ~ Chris Crutcher, #NFDB
255:You don't know this, 'cause you're too young," came the usual lecture, "but the politicians run all the big scams. Government's the thief of all time. That's why it tries so hard to catch thieves - it doesn't like the competition ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
256:He is a general at war with his own army. An exhorter of radical beliefs, shrinking from their obvious conclusions. It was so much easier in the lecture hall, the salon, the seminar. When theory need not be demonstrated in blood. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
257:Math is supremely important. Do you know how important it is…” and then proceeds to lecture on about the importance of math in life until her children beg her to stop because they would rather just do the math than listen to her. ~ Maya Thiagarajan, #NFDB
258:Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world. ~ Angela Davis, #NFDB
259:Also by Jimmy Carter Our Endangered Values Sharing Good Times The Hornet’s Nest The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture Christmas in Plains (illustrated by Amy Carter) An Hour Before Daylight The Virtues of Aging Sources of Strength: Meditations on ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
260:I could lecture on dry oak leaves; I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
261:Not sure if you intend to stay with your meal plan, but I highly suggest you have something for lunch other than that second bottle of wine.” He could shove his suggestion up his fire hose. “I’m not in the mood for a lecture, thank you. ~ Terri Osburn, #NFDB
262:They told me that Arturo Belano once gave a lecture at the Casa del Lago and when it was his turn to talk he forgot everything. I think the lecture was supposed to be on Chilean poetry and Belano improvised a talk about horror movies. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
263:I admire your work and was a big fan of your lecture, so the misunderstanding between us is particularly painful to me. I take these issues very seriously and am, I think, alert to nuances in this regard, as I hope my work demonstrates. ~ David Shields, #NFDB
264:Plus tu plonges dans la lecture d'un livre, plus ton plaisir augmente, plus ta nature s'affine, plus ta langue se délie, plus ton vocabulaire s'enrichit, plus ton âme est gagnée par l'enthousiasme et le ravissement, plus ton cœur est comblé. ~ Al Jahiz, #NFDB
265:What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized. ~ Justin Simien, #NFDB
266:Active imagination is to be understood as a way or method, to heal, raise and transform the personality. Through active imagination the image is imprinted on the psychic essence of personality with the purpose of transformation. ~ Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, #NFDB
267:The one thing I try to do when I lecture classes in the short story, once or twice a year, is knock down the inferiority I find in student after student, the devil imps that tell them they cannot do what in their hearts they most wish to do. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
268:The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: “Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing? ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
269:I have looked high.” Her voice was an urgent whisper. “And I have fallen farther than you can imagine. So don’t you lecture me. All I want is to pretend that this is enough—that I can be satisfied by the scraps that remain to me. ” He had ~ Courtney Milan, #NFDB
270:Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science through which men look after the correlation which exists in the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.[14] His first lecture ~ John P D Cooper, #NFDB
271:If you're creating something that has some sort of cultural currency - if the idea is getting out there - then that will probably yield money in some form, whether it's through selling art or selling books or being asked to give a lecture. ~ Shepard Fairey, #NFDB
272:monism that moved on into a flourishing school called Neo-Realism. If a piece of chalk is dropped on the lecture table, that interaction of chalk and table is different only in complexity from the perceptions and knowledges that fill our minds. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
273:What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
274:As Samuel Spaulding, Esquire, once said, 'Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.' Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. End of lecture. Besides, a mess of dandelion greens is good eating once in a while. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
275:It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. ~ John O Donohue, #NFDB
276:I think it would be worth the while to introduce a school of children to such [an oak grove], that they may get an idea of the primitive oaks before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it is too late. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
277:You must go around the states lecturing to women. And the inoffensive writers who've never dared lecture anyone, let alone women-they are frightened of women, they do not understand women, they write about women as creatures that never existed, ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
278:I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
279:I am opposed to textbooks... I find it hateful to give a course where I have to plough my way through chapter after chapter of a given book. The liveliness of the lecture, which is meant to give an impetus to the sudents, would suffer tremendously. ~ Emil Artin, #NFDB
280:I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave. ~ William James, #NFDB
281:It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds—Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture!” “Okay, yeah,” I admitted. “Those things don’t exist. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
282:Theatre can entertain, provoke, challenge, investigate, comfort and educate. It's arrogant of a playwright to think education is more important than anything else. Writing for the theatre does not give you permission to lecture, hector or bore. ~ Alistair Beaton, #NFDB
283:What was that you showed Sonya?”
Dimitri suddenly joined Rose on the screen. She shot him an amused look. “Easy, comrade. You’ll get your chance to lecture them too.”
“Geez,” said Adrian. “How many other people are there lurking off-screen? ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
284:As professor in the Polytechnic School in Zürich I found myself for the first time obliged to lecture upon the elements of the differential calculus and felt more keenly than ever before the lack of a really scientific foundation for arithmetic. ~ Richard Dedekind, #NFDB
285:Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
286:Thus old men are honoured with a particular respect, yet all the rest fare as well as they. Both dinner and supper are begun with some lecture of morality that is read to them; but it is so short that it is not tedious nor uneasy to them to hear it. ~ Thomas More, #NFDB
287:Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
288:I’m not going anywhere until you hear me out.”
Oh, please no. Anything except having to listen to her lecture. I push the button that calls the nurse.
“Can we help you, Alex?” a voice bellows through the speaker.
“I’m bein’ tortured. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
289:It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds - Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician's sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture!'
'Okay, yeah,' I admitted. 'Those things don't exist. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
290:The best university in the world is neither Oxford nor Harvard. The best university is "youniversity". YOU got the lecture halls of thoughts in YOU! You got everything you need to graduate with first class accomplishments put in you! YOU can do it! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
291:I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
292:He turned away. “I don’t want a lecture.”
Fair enough. “What do you want?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Kat scooted a little closer but not enough to touch him. “Yes. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
He stared straight ahead. “I want to forget. ~ Laurann Dohner,#NFDB
293:as a teenager i experienced existential despair as an unsexy sensation of repressed orgasm in the chest; today i experience existential despair as a distinct sensation of wanting to lecture you on how i am better than you, without crushing your hopes and dreams ~ Tao Lin, #NFDB
294:Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth. With God’s help, of course, but God comes off as an engineer instead of a hothead vigilante.) ~ Sarah Vowell, #NFDB
295:I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don't want to glorify a killer. I don't want to glorify a rapist. I don't want to do those things, but on the other hand I don't want to lecture to you, either. ~ Sydney Pollack, #NFDB
296:His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day. ~ Mary Antin, #NFDB
297:On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9: 35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology— trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,” function. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
298:Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II. “Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
299:Sharply, Lan said, "I don't need my little brother to lecture me like an old man."
Hilo tilted his head at the reprimand. Then he smiled broadly, his face transforming, regaining its open boyishness. "True; you have enough of that around here already, don't you? ~ Fonda Lee,#NFDB
300:The burden of the lecture is just to emphasize he fact that it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
301:Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
302:You're so narrow-minded! You live in the same village you grew up in, you run the family business, you're buying a nursery down the road... you're practically still in the womb. So before you lecture me on the way to live my life, try living one of your own, OK? ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
303:When Mom picked me up a little after nine, I expected her to rave about my make-over. Instead, I got a lecture about how girls my age were trying to grow up too quickly and make-up should enhance one’s natural beauty. Crushed, I remained silent the entire way home. ~ Brenda Pandos, #NFDB
304:When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?' ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
305:And sometimes I misbehave on purpose."
"Seriously?!"
"It's called being a brat. Ben will sometimes indulge me [and punish me], but occasionally I have to listen to a lecture about asking for what I want. And those times, I get sent to bed without an orgasm. ~ Sierra Cartwright,#NFDB
306:Junior huffed. "The point is, this rope is even better! I call it Andskoti. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds-.Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician's sincerity, a printer that prints, health deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
307:Trey scoffed. "Between you and me, Brayden's probably the last guy in the world you have to worry about. I think he's as clueless as you are. If I didn't care about your virtue so much, I'd actually probably give him a lecture on 'how' to try something." -Trey, pg. 70 ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
308:What will the greatest experiment discover? I have no idea!, maybe nothing!, If we won't check, we will never know. In science there is never a guarantee of success. If you understood this last sentence, then you understood the most important message of this lecture. ~ Nathan Seiberg, #NFDB
309:You gave your inaugural lecture on 24 June 1959. The lecture hall was crowded. Stage fright? No, I had written a good lecture. You were remarkably self-confident. Perhaps that’s overstating it, but I knew the lecture was fine; in that sense I didn’t need to be nervous. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
310:I left that church with rich and royal hatred of the priest as a person, and a loathing for the church as an institution, and I vowed that I would never go inside a church again.
[Eugene V. Debs, describing his teenage reaction to a hellfire lecture by a priest] ~ Eugene V Debs,#NFDB
311:You enjoy solitude?" she asked, resting her cheek on her hand.
"Travelling alone, eating alone, sitting by yourself in lecture halls ..."
"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
312:I stand up, sure of one thing and one thing only. That my father will come and get me. He won't give me a lecture, he won't try to teach me a lesson. He won't ask a thousand questions or ask me to apologize. He'll just come and get me.
"Just tell me where you are. ~ Melina Marchetta,#NFDB
313:Aren't you tired of these career politicians on the left side of the aisle moralizing about the greed of the 'wealthy' when these same politicians habitually buy votes with borrowed dollars? Who are they to lecture those who actually produce and contribute to the economy? ~ David Limbaugh, #NFDB
314:It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
315:The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students’ libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents. ~ Isaac Deutscher, #NFDB
316:Good theology is not the knowledge of theology but the knowledge of God. Bad theology is the theology of the theologian who died and went to Heaven and at the gates of Heaven God offered him the choice between Heaven and a theology lecture on Heaven, and he chose the lecture. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
317:Mark Twain describes how his friend Ralph Keeler introduced him at the start of a lecture: " 'I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is (after a pause, and almost sadly), I don't know why. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
318:Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race. ~ Mark Hopkins, Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846) Lecture II, p. 49, #NFDB
319:In his first eight years on the global lecture circuit, Bill had never been paid to speak in Nigeria. But once Hillary was appointed secretary of state, he booked two of his top three highest-paid speeches ever by traveling to Nigeria, pulling in a whopping $700,000 each.69 ~ Peter Schweizer, #NFDB
320:A map of the moon... should be in every geological lecture room; for no where can we have a more complete or more magnificent illustration of volcanic operations. Our sublimest volcanoes would rank among the smaller lunar eminences; and our Etnas are but spitting furnaces. ~ James Dwight Dana, #NFDB
321:Dorian, C, Corp: It's my sincere belief that your potential is wasted in that sweaty little cockpit. You should be doing the Coreworld lecture circuit. Imagine it: Packed houses. Perfect hair. Screaming girlchildren. "Tonight Only. Ezra Mason: How To State The Bleeding Obvious. ~ Amie Kaufman, #NFDB
322:Listen instead of lecture. Communicate instead of command. Relate instead of retaliate. Be flexible instead of being fixated on getting your own way. Seek to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. In short, behave the way you want your children to learn to behave. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
323:Welcome to my world! I've been through it all, and I often pinch myself to believe my luck. I design jewlery, create cosmetics, perform comedy, act, lecture, write books, travel, have a fabulous daughter, and a phenomenal grandson-and I feel I'm the luckiest woman on the planet. ~ Joan Rivers, #NFDB
324:You have chosen a very pretty and a very affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too—of course I know that; I am not delivering a lecture—to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
325:You’ll never make sense of his notes. You just have to listen to his lecture,” Graham whispered
confidentially. “It’s a challenge, but the good news is that he’s been giving the same tests for forty years. The
answers are carved right into the tops of the desks. See? ~ G Norman Lippert,#NFDB
326:Self-knowledge can, and ought, to apply not only to the soul, but also to the body;
the man without insight into the fabric of his body has no knowledge of himself. —JOHN MOIR, student of anatomy, notes from opening lecture,
Anatomical Education in a Scottish University, 1620 ~ Bill Hayes,#NFDB
327:The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten. ~ Philip Jones Griffiths, #NFDB
328:Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes. ~ George Stigler, #NFDB
329:I’m not going anywhere until you hear me out.”
Oh, please no. Anything except having to listen to her lecture. I push the button that calls the nurse.
“Can we help you, Alex?” a voice bellows through the speaker.
“I’m bein’ tortured.”
“I beg your pardon? ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
330:I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, "I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder." ~ Martin Rees, #NFDB
331:These lecture provide material for the consideration of common factors, in theory and in development, from the viewpoint of the idea of surrender to the Divine Will, reviewing some aspects of the interplay between Christians and Moslems, and introducing material from and about Sufis. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
332:If you were to show me your current financial plan, would I get so excited by it that I would go across the country and lecture on it? If the answer is no, then here's my question: ‘Why not?’ Why wouldn't you have a superior financial plan that is taking you to the places you want to go? ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
333:I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
334:So that was it: now that she thinks he’s “one of us” she can lecture him. She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible. ~ Sayaka Murata, #NFDB
335:In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join. ~ Ben Macintyre, #NFDB
336:In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the “inner ring,” the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join. ~ Ben Macintyre, #NFDB
337:We cannot learn patience by reading a book or hearing a lecture. The only way we can learn patience is by going through the trials that God assigns to us. The trials of life are the tools God uses to mature us, to build our faith, and to get us to trust the Spirit and not the flesh. ~ Warren W Wiersbe, #NFDB
338:Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish. ~ Christopher Isherwood, #NFDB
339:I frequently lecture on the dangers of misusing time. People often ask me afterward about what I feel is the biggest waste on time, suspecting that I will say something like television or arguing politics. I think the biggest waste of time is feeling sorry for yourself. That and traffic. ~ Nathan Van Coops, #NFDB
340:As I listened to the radio tell her story, it was hard to not think education should look more like this—paint splotches and messy smocks in a cramped studio—and less like large lecture halls with passive students parked in seats for ninety minutes at a time, eyes glued to a slide presentation. ~ Jeff Goins, #NFDB
341:those who attended the lecture course supported my views. The consequence of it all was that, a few days later, I was assigned to a regiment then stationed at Munich and given a position there as ‘instruction officer.’ At that time the spirit of discipline was rather weak-among those troops. It ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
342:1. The lecture notes that mission statements can be mundane, uninspiring, routine, and forgotten. They can also be nonexistent. Do you have a mission statement, an articulation of your purpose in life? If not, craft one now. If so, ask honestly, as Mintzberg suggests we do, whether it inspires you. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
343:Il n'y a pas de livres en ce monde que chacun devrait lire, il n'y a que des livres qu'une personne devrait lire à un certain moment, dans un certain endroit, dans des circonstances données et à une certaine époque de sa vie. Je crois que la lecture, comme le mariage, est déterminée par le destin. ~ Lin Yutang, #NFDB
344:Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. "I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness."
"May I ask for a specific example?"
"Fat priests," Royce replied, "with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
345:Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004. On February 5, we were feeling pretty confident, even from observing the first few hours of usage. Students used it like crazy. They'd sign up then spend the next 3-4 hours on it. Then we'd go to lecture hall and see it on every computer screen there. ~ Dustin Moskovitz, #NFDB
346:Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out - that sort of thing. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
347:Our country has a lot of problems. When the world looks at how bad the United States is and then we go talk about civil liberties, I do not think we are a very good messenger. I don't know that we have a right to lecture. We are not in a position to be more aggressive. We have to fix our own mess. ~ Marco Rubio, #NFDB
348:Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
349:There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma"., #NFDB
350:Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection. ~ David Wheeler (Attributed in: Butler Lampson. Principles for Computer System Design. Turing Award Lecture. February 17, 1993.) Wheeler is said to have added the appendage "Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.", #NFDB
351:Bringing up teenagers is like sweeping back ocean waves with a frazzled broom-the inundation of outside influences never stops. Whatever the lure-cars, easy money, cigarettes, drugs, booze, sex, crime-much that glitters along the shore has a thousand times the appeal of a parent's lecture. ~ Mary Ellen Snodgrass, #NFDB
352:The girls were riveted by Georgia’s lecture on the importance of sports bras and the dangers of the uni-boob, double busting, slippage, unsightly bulges, and my personal favorite, head lighting. I thought she made valid points and I would never have guessed that bouncing boobs were so problematic. ~ Ashlan Thomas, #NFDB
353:Do you know anything about the Brannicks?"
"Irish girls, red hair," I replied, remembering a picture of them from Mrs. Casnoff's "People Who Want to Kill Us All" lecture at Hex Hall last year. I also remembered Mrs. Casnoff saying that if the Brannicks and The Eye ever teamed up, we were screwed. ~ Rachel Hawkins,#NFDB
354:We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. ~ Ernst J nger, #NFDB
355:Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their "responsibilities" are almost always up to no good. ~ Steven E Landsburg, #NFDB
356:L'ermitage resserre les ambitions aux proportions du possible. En rétrécissant la panoplie des actions, on augmente la profondeur de chaque expérience. La lecture, l'écriture, la pêche, l'ascension des versants, le patin, la flânerie dans les bois... l'existence se réduit à une quinzaine d'activités. ~ Sylvain Tesson, #NFDB
357:Electrons and photons are still worse. In graduate school I roomed for a time with a particle physicist. He ended one attempt to explain the essence of an exciting lecture by admitting, with uncommon candor, that he could think of no explanation, not even an analogy, that wasn’t unacceptably misleading. ~ Steven Vogel, #NFDB
358:If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
359:In a lecture I attended once, the speaker concluded by saying that now we were all 90 minutes closer to death. People in the audience chuckled, but the speaker remarked, quite angrily, that what he said was actually rather sad. The passing of time is a deep and sad truth that no man or woman can change. ~ Haim Shapira, #NFDB
360:(It took Dewey only a few years to shift from responsible intellectual of World War I to “anarchist of the lecture-platform,” denouncing the “un-free press” and questioning “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
361:Don't you mean to lecture me on the evils of illicit relationships?'
'No. I am quite certain you are aware of the disagreeable consequences if the /ton/ were to discover your activities. But I have found that occasionally a small peccadillo that harms no one can be conducive to a cheerful disposition. ~ Eloisa James,#NFDB
362:The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once though…things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
363:I feel that people who haven't read my books and haven't heard me lecture - who don't in fact know what my work is about - have been very hard on me. There is an expression in Alcoholics Anonymous called "contempt prior to investigation." I feel many people practice contempt prior to investigation. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
364:Professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach: authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
365:Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs. ~ Stephen Leacock, #NFDB
366:For leftists, the answer to domestic violence isn’t to deal with any of the issues that could lead boys to become abusing men. The answer, instead, is to lecture Americans about the use of the word “sissy” — not because that solves the problem, but because it makes those on the left feel warm and fuzzy inside. ~ Ben Shapiro, #NFDB
367:You're not supposed to have equations in a public lecture, so think of this as a piece of art. ~ Joseph Polchinski, introducing the Dirac equation as improvement upon the Schrödinger equation in "Space-time versus the Quantum" (November 25, 2014) 59th Annual Faculty Research Lecture, University of California, Santa Barbara., #NFDB
368:Bustle turned up, with his reedy, self-satisfied voice, and gave her a lecture on the Lesser Elements and how, indeed, humans were made up of nearly all of them but also contained a lot of narrativium, the basic element of stories, which you could detect only by watching the way all the others behaved. . . . ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
369:When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
370:When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
371:La vérité est que tout homme intelligent, vous le savez bien, rêve d'être un gangster et de régner sur la société par la seule violence. Comme ce n'est pas aussi facile que veut bien le faire croire la lecture des romans spécialisés, on s'en remet généralement à la politique et l'on court au parti le plus cruel. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
372:PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
373:The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.
Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up - there's a way out.
~ Stephen Hawkings,#NFDB
374:This means that more than 95% of the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, masters-level therapists, occupational therapists, educational therapists, movement therapists, dance therapists, art therapists, music therapists, and others had never been given a lecture defining the mind. ~ Daniel J Siegel, #NFDB
375:Al had expected his dad to lecture him about never turning to drink to solve problems. Instead, he'd commiserated that sometimes you need to get really pissed so your body feels as bad as your heart does. Once every fiber of your being feels like bloody hell, you can start mending the broken bits one day a time. ~ Amy E Reichert, #NFDB
376:discussion: Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their “responsibilities” are almost always up to no good. ~ Steven E Landsburg, #NFDB
377:Kronos became the Titan of time. He couldn’t pop around the time stream like Doctor Who or anything, but he could occasionally make time slow down or speed up. Whenever you’re in an incredibly boring lecture that seems to take forever, blame Kronos. Or when your weekend is way too short, that’s Kronos’s fault, too. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
378:The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world. ~ Susan Cain, #NFDB
379:L'homme construit des maisons parce qu'il est vivant, mais il écrit des livres parce qu'il se sait mortel. Il habite en bande parce qu'il est grégaire, mais il lit parce qu'il se sait seul. Cette lecture lui est une compagnie qui ne prend la place d'aucune autre, mais qu'aucune autre compagnie ne saurait remplacer. ~ Daniel Pennac, #NFDB
380:The sequence was initiated by Gene's insisting I give a lecture on Asperger's syndrome that he had previously agreed to deliver himself. The timing was extremely annoying. The preparation could be time-shared with lunch consumption, on the designated evening I had scheduled ninety-four minutes to clean my bathroom. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
381:If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
382:I'm just a crusty old academic, I suppose, more comfortable in solitary pursuits than social ones. I can lecture eloquently about how our hopes and dreams and fears are reflected in our myths and legends and what that says about being human, but I'm not so good at acting like one, I'm afraid. Or at enjoying their company. ~ Kevin Lucia, #NFDB
383:To them, life wasn’t complete unless they held the moral high ground and used it ruthlessly to lecture and belittle their juniors for not living up to their moral standards. But then, they were rarely actually powerful, if only because few would vote them into power. Their preaching and whining was all they had. ~ Christopher G Nuttall, #NFDB
384:A man may have intelligence enough to excel in a particular thing and lecture on it, and yet not have sense enough to know he ought to be silent on some other subject of which he has but a slight knowledge; if such an illustrious man ventures beyond the bounds of his capacity, he loses his way and talks like a fool. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
385:With every lecture, you’re forced to look again at every choice you’ve made over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
386:After practice today, Coach pulled me aside and gave me a ten-minute lecture about the importance of keeping my grades up. Well, lecture is too generous a description—his exact words had been “maintain your average or I’ll shove my foot so far up your ass you’ll be able to taste my shoe polish in your mouth for years to come. ~ Elle Kennedy, #NFDB
387:I have seen many phases of life; I have moved in imperial circles, I have been a Minister of State; but if I had to live my life again, I would always remain in my laboratory, for the greatest joy of my life has been to accomplish original scientific work, and, next to that, to lecture to a set of intelligent students. ~ Jean Baptiste Dumas, #NFDB
388:With every lecture, you’re forced to look again at every choice you’ve made
over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
389:He did not seem like a fallen angel now. His spell had stopped. He seemed like a professor who had forgotten the theme of his lecture, while the class waits.
For Morano was holding up the sign of the cross.
"You have betrayed me!" shouted the Slave of Orion.
"Master," Morano said, "it was always good against magic. ~ Lord Dunsany,#NFDB
390:In the Marquette Lecture volume, I focus on the question in the title. I emphasize the social and political costs of being a Christian in the earliest centuries, and contend that many attempts to answer the question are banal. I don't attempt a full answer myself, but urge that scholars should take the question more seriously. ~ Larry Hurtado, #NFDB
391:The point is, this rope is even better! I call it Andskoti, the Adversary. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds – Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food and an interesting grammar lecture!’
‘Okay, yeah,’ I admitted. ‘Those things don’t exist. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
392:Were you snubbed?” asked his son tranquilly. “But we have spoilt the pleasure of I don’t know how many people. They won’t come back.” “. . . full of innate sympathy . . . quickness to perceive good in others . . . vision of the brotherhood of man . . .” Scraps of the lecture on St. Francis came floating round the partition wall. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
393:I've found that no one complains about pop culture being a source of someone lecturing to them. If someone's telling you about Kim Kardashian, you're not going to accuse them of lecturing to you. If I can explore an intersection between pop culture and science literacy, then it generally will not come across as a lecture. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
394:Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
395:The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people." – Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture ~ James Scott Bell, #NFDB
396:If you can do that, if you can find exactly the place where the other is and begin there, you may perhaps have the luck to lead him to the place where you are.
For to be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,#NFDB
397:He doesn’t like intellectuals. Trump was a guy who “never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
398:It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature. ~ Albert Einstein, On the Method of Theoretical Physics (1933) Lecture at the University of Oxford, as quoted in Mathematics Magazine (1990) Vol. 63., p. 237., #NFDB
399:Either you can work on both, or you can keep thinking with your balls. It's your choice. Say 'pop.'"
"Pop?"
"That was the sound of me pulling your head out of your ass. If you stick it back up there again, there is nothing I can do about it. This is the only lecture you'll ever get from me."
I headed for the door. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
400:I remember a funny dinner at my brother's, where, amongst a few others, were Babbage and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced every one by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting lecture on silence. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
401:Junior huffed. “The point is, this rope is even better! I call it Andskoti, the Adversary. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds—Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture!” “Okay, yeah,” I admitted. “Those things don’t exist. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
402:She never knew what to expect: a lecture from a visiting doctor on the gory specifics of the procedure, complete with jars of fetuses in formaldehyde; an "ideation session" where they had to imagine alternate futures for their aborted children; a holovid showing bloody, half-aborted babies trying to crawl out of their mothers' wombs. ~ Hillary Jordan, #NFDB
403:Government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions. They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a 'living wage' all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
404:I once wrote a lecture for Manchester University called « Moments of Discovery » in which I said that there are two moments that are important. There's the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that's the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you've got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy. ~ Dorothy Hodgkin, #NFDB
405:People put clips of me up. There are quotes from me. I've written books, of course. I'm on Twitter. There are dozens of ways to consume my offerings, and a lecture in a large venue is really only just one of them. So I have no concerns about how much access people would have to me no matter what is the capacity of your pocketbook. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
406:- Do you know what your problem is?
- You're going to lecture me on my problems? Really?
- Lack of empathy - I thought. You can read people's thoughts, but you don't recognize them as belonging to real people. You don't pay attention to their motivations or what they care about; you just use brute force to make them what you want. ~ Benedict Jacka,#NFDB
407:It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, but the gamble was taken and very shortly afterwards, I had this extraordinary fortune of stopping at Harvard to do a lecture and learning about the price variation in just the right way. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot, #NFDB
408:This effect has long been known. Alexander Fleming described it in his 1945 Nobel Prize lecture upon receiving the prize for the discovery of penicillin. “Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant,” Fleming warned. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
409:Je retrouvai ma table et me replongeai dans la Correspondance de Mérimée. Cette lecture m'insufflait comme un regain d'énergie, mais quand j'appris que Mérimée s'était vers la fin de sa vie converti au protestantisme, il me sembla brusquement voir le visage nu qu'il cachait ous le masque; lui aussi marchait comme moi dans les ténèbres. ~ Ry nosuke Akutagawa, #NFDB
410:What’s happening is a very stern lecture. You do not walk to your car at night, alone, ever again. It’s dangerous, and I won’t allow you to put yourself in harm’s way. If I find out you have, the lecture will become a spanking.”
She couldn’t help it. She smiled. “Is that what you’re into?”
“Kenna.”
“No judgment, really. ~ Gena Showalter,#NFDB
411:It would be fine, if only I knew how to turn the shower off.” Guinzburg laughed. “Perhaps you should ask Miss Redwood to come to your rescue.” “If she did, I’m not sure I’d know how to turn her off.” “Ah, so she’s already subjected you to her lecture on the importance of getting Nothing Ventured on to the bestseller list as quickly as possible. ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
412:Mais c'est, plus quotidiennement, le refuge du livre contre le crépitement de la pluie, le silencieux éblouissement des pages contre la cadence du métro, le roman planqué dans le tiroir de la secrétaire, la petite lecture du prof quand planchent ses élèves, et l'élève de fond de classe lisant en douce, en attendant de rendre une copie blanche... ~ Daniel Pennac, #NFDB
413:The last time Wendell's mother had caught them playing cowboys and Indians, she'd read them a twenty-minute lecture on the history of Native American oppression, which had really put a damper on things. It was hard to have a thrilling shoot-out while yelling: 'I respect your position and hope that we can come to a mutually respectful conclusion! ~ Ursula Vernon, #NFDB
414:But when some became hardened and would not believe, slandering the Way in front of the crowd, he withdrew from them and met separately with the disciples, conducting discussions every day in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. g 10 And this went on for two years, so that all the inhabitants of •Asia, both Jews and Greeks, heard the message about the Lord. h ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
415:In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma"., #NFDB
416:You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
417:I don't want to give a lecture to this body that's out there. You know, I mean, having had the heart attack, I want to get it back functioning. And as a practical matter, I mean if you were Bear Stearns, and you were a shareholder, you know, you lost 90 to 95 percent of your money. A good many lost their jobs. They lost very cushy lives, many of them. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
418:The attempt [by the far-left] to boil down fascism to 'anything I don't like' is simply idiotic. Which is more fascist: Christina Hoff Sommers coming to speak about the lies of the feminist movement, or the people who are suggesting that they should actually be able to shut down her lecture by use of force?
That seems a little more fascist to me. ~ Ben Shapiro,#NFDB
419:AMY’S LECTURE DID Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don’t take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
420:Trump was a guy who “never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that’s good enough. He’s going to be a billionaire. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
421:I've often said that the desire to lecture China on how it should behave in the world is wrong. China was around for thousands of years even before America existed. It could even be that China's growing power will allow itself to be slowed down. But as long as this immense empire doesn't fall apart, it will become an important factor in global politics. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
422:Repetition sometimes works in poetry, but rarely in prose. The musical provocateur John Cage once wrote a lecture in which a single page was repeated fourteen times, with the refrain "If anybody is sleep let him go to sleep" (Cage, 1961). Midway through, the artist Jean Reynal stood up and screamed, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
423:The morning after her date with her nerdishly cute prince of darkness, Cassie is scheduled for a lecture at nine o’clock. She blows it off because life’s too short and anyway the world is going to end in about two weeks’ time, when the Second Heavy Cavalry Brigade rumbles into town accompanied by skies that rain wyrmfire and the death spells of combat magi. ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
424:If someone from politics got up to give a lecture on New Guinea without having read the literature in the field or been there, the anthropologists would be horrified out of their wits, and properly so. Yet these people get up and lecture on social systems without having read Trotsky or Lenin or Hook. A hell of an attitude for people who make a fetish of scholar! ~ Maya Deren, #NFDB
425:Another alternative would have been to give you what's called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don't understand, and to gratify what I believe to be on of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
426:At the point in his lecture where he was saying that the representative element in a work of art is always irrelevant, that for one to appreciate a work of art one must bring to it nothing from life, no knowledge of life’s affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions and desires, he was seized by the most stupefying boredom and he had to leave the stage. ~ Joy Williams, #NFDB
427:For example, once I failed to find elf toenails for her. (I still haven't found anybody who supplies them, for that matter. The witch refuses to admit that certain ingredients might be mythical.) For punishment the witch turned me into a solar panel sales-man and made me go around to every house in a half-mile radius and lecture about alternative energy forms. ~ Tina Connolly, #NFDB
428:If there's one thing I've learned in the last 18+ years of interacting with over 60,000 people during my vegan lecture tour, it's that everyone is the same, whether they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, Republican, Democrat, independent, socialist, fascist, black, white, Asian, Latino, Native, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun or anti-gun. ~ Gary Yourofsky, #NFDB
429:In 1910, John Dewey published an important essay entitled “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (Dewey 1981, pp. 31–41). In a recent unpublished lecture, “The Importance of Darwin for Philosophy,” Philip Kitcher describes Dewey’s essay as “the single best philosophical response to Darwin published in the first century after the appearance of the Origin. ~ Richard J Bernstein, #NFDB
430:Well, I’m glad we got a lead on Jill,” she said. “But you guys really should have been more
careful about—”
“What was that you showed Sonya?”
Dimitri suddenly joined Rose on the screen. She shot him an amused look. “Easy, comrade. You’ll
get your chance to lecture them too.”
“Geez,” said Adrian. “How many other people are there lurking off-screen? ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
431:Online education is pretty special for two reasons. One is that you can get the very best lecture in the world and wherever you are, whenever you want, you can connect to that lecture. The other is this interactivity, where if you know a topic, you can kind of skip over it. Or if you're confused about it, [the area] where you're confused can be analyzed by software. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
432:If I waited to be in the mood to write, I’d barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don’t know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it’s the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it. ~ Dani Shapiro, #NFDB
433:When I was twenty-one, a friend gave me a book called Diet for a New America by John Robbins, which exposed the brutal practices of American factory farms. That, coupled with a lecture from Leonardo DiCaprio (when he was nineteen and I was twenty-one) about how such animals are kept and processed, made me lose my desire for factory farm pork and beef right there. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow, #NFDB
434:He felt disgruntled and obscurely let down at having paid good money to discover that the vision that had so irradiated his consciousness was a second-hand one. On the other hand, he told himself, probably it was better to hear that a phantom memory had come floating up out of some lecture of his student days than to be informed that he was going out of his mind. ~ Robert Silverberg, #NFDB
435:If an Elder shall give us a lecture upon astronomy, chemistry, or geology, our religion embraces it all. It matters not what the subject be, if it tends to improve the mind, exalt the feelings, and enlarge the capacity. The truth that is in all the arts and sciences forms part of our religion. Faith is no more a part of it than any other true principle of philosophy. ~ Brigham Young, #NFDB
436:Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism".,#NFDB
437:wanted to shout and lecture them, but she knew they would react poorly to such a chastisement, so instead she gave them her best verbal punch. “No.” She smiled with all the tranquility she could muster. “I am filled with grave disappointment over your conduct, but I trust you—as I always have. I do hope you will act with greater wisdom next time, wisdom I know you possess. ~ K M Shea, #NFDB
438:We usually break the story first. For instance, on The Monuments Men, and this one is more complicated because there's a lot of history, so before we started, we sat down with Robert Edsel, the author of the book, for about a week, and basically, he just gave us a lecture and went through everything. And then, I had a researcher, somebody who we had actually used on Argo. ~ Grant Heslov, #NFDB
439:When Halliburton expressed curiosity about this “inconceivable power,” Bob took him into his room, showed him his “immense file of pictures,” and gave him a lecture on visualization. Far from being impressed, Halliburton became convinced that “Irwin had no pre-imagination, none whatsoever. That was his whole problem. He could imitate things. He couldn’t create things. ~ Harold Schechter, #NFDB
440:How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages. ~ Russell Baker, #NFDB
441:keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin’s admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics. ~ Robert D Kaplan, #NFDB
442:Without real experience in using the computer to get useful results the computer science major is apt to know all about the marvelous tool except how to use it. Such a person is a mere technician, skilled in manipulating the tool but with little sense of how and when to use it for its basic purposes. ~ Richard Hamming, 1968 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 16 (1), January 1969, p. 6, #NFDB
443:There are black Christians, and black Muslims in Africa who are being slaughtered, they don't want to hear about the Jim Crow laws. There are Christians, there are other Muslims being slaughtered in the Middle East, they don't need a lecture from Obama about Christianity. The fact of the matter is Obama is not doing anything effective or substantive to stop genocide in our time. ~ Mark Levin, #NFDB
444:This is doable, of course—minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
445:Tracy is turning into a skeleton right before my eyes. Last night as we lay in bed talking I looked at her profile and it was like she was already dead, her skull hanging in a professor’s lecture hall. I can’t believe how much weight she’s already lost. It’s like the decomposition process can’t wait until after death, it’s getting a head start. The sight takes my breath away. ~ Frederick Marx, #NFDB
446:British physicist, novelist, and science advisor C. P. Snow, a man who straddled many worlds, like the scientist/artist/statesmen of old. In a famous 1959 lecture titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Snow warned that the widening communication gulf between the sciences and the humanities threatened the ability of modern peoples to solve their problems: ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
447:Elizabeth’s entire body started to tremble as his lips began descending to hers. and she sought to forestall what her heart knew was inevitable by reasoning with him. “A gently bred Englishwoman,” she shakily quoted Lucinda’s lecture. “feels nothing stronger than affection. We do not fall in love.”
His warm lips covered hers. “I’m a Scot,” he murmured huskily. “We do. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
448:-You do know to put the condom on as soon as the penis is erect, don't you?
-I paid a fortune for bananas out of season in case you need the practice.
This is a trap. If I say, Oh yeah, I roll rubbers onto new dry erections all the time, I'll get the slut lecture from my father. But if I tell them, No, we'll get to spend Christmas Day practicing to protect me from fruit. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
449:Rise and enter the lair, where the darkness gives you your stripes. Tell tyrants, to you, their allegiance they owe," Etta read, running her finger beneath the words within the star. "Seek out the unknown gods whose ears were deaf to lecture. Stand on the shoulders of memory. Bring a coin to the widowed queen. Remember, the truth is in the telling, and an ending must be final. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
450:I think the media's primarily an interesting backdrop - a fertile backdrop, in which we can discuss a great deal involving the human condition. We're not trying to lecture the media on how it should be doing its job or lecture people on who they should be voting for, but it does provide an incredible backdrop on which we can paint a lot of pictures and open up a lot of discussions. ~ Thomas Sadoski, #NFDB
451:Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know. ~ Julian Fellowes, #NFDB
452:When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
453:Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
454:Dressed as he was in a practically fluorescent pink tee-shirt and denim shorts cut at the knee, Adam drew his fair share of odd looks as he and Harriet hurried through the sleet from the lecture theatre to the campus refectory. He made a solemn vow to never again take the piss out of guys unseasonably dressed – they too might just be poor sods doing the walk of shame after a theme night. ~ Erin Lawless, #NFDB
455:For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.] ~ C P Snow,#NFDB
456:Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, "This lecture was a load of crap." The more profound a professor's distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
457:We drove to the airport. On the way, Clay gave him "the lecture," including all the do's and don'ts of meeting the Alpha, which was only slightly more complicated than an audience with the queen. Don't sit until you're invited to. Don't talk unless he asks you a question. Don't eat before he does. Don't make direct eye contact. Jeremy demanded none of this, but that wasn't the point. ~ Kelley Armstrong, #NFDB
458:Does teaching mean talking or a lecture?” rich dad asked. “Well, yes,” I replied. “That’s how they teach you in school,” he said, smiling. “But that is not how life teaches you, and I would say that life is the best teacher of all. Most of the time, life does not talk to you. It just sort of pushes you around. Each push is life saying, ‘Wake up. There’s something I want you to learn. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
459:I believe that science fiction is as profound as you want it to be or it can be very simple entertainment, and I'm all for very simple entertainment. Every now and then we all need to come home, veg-out, watch something and not think too deeply about it. It's what you want it to be. We tend to steer clear of being pedantic; it's entertainment first, otherwise we'd be on a lecture circuit. ~ Joe Flanigan, #NFDB
460:Men always think they’re hot. It’s like an inheritable trait attached to the Y-chromosome.” She switched to lecture mode, which was a definite weakness of his. “Even fat, ugly guys think they’re hot, whereas amazingly gorgeous women worry about not being perfect or having stomachs that aren’t taut as drums.” He shrugged. “So I’m fat, ugly, and hot.” “And my stomach is taut as a drum.” He ~ Toni Anderson, #NFDB
461:On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating “paparazzi” over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, “But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?” and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
462:He stared at my wet hair. "You been under that fucking waterfall again?"
"Not today." I didn't get why it bothered him so much, unless maybe the thought it set a bad example for Nicki. "Why do you care?"
He shrugged. "I don't. Knock your brains loose if you want." He blew out a huge cloud of smoke, which I thought was a pretty ironic thing to do while giving me a safety lecture. ~ Jennifer R Hubbard,#NFDB
463:The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion. ~ Douglas Hofstadter, #NFDB
464:Holmes paused. "No lecture?"
Leander - because it had to be Leander - laughed. "You've done worse things, and anyway, it's fairly clear you aren't actually having sex. This may be indelicate, but those sheets aren't hardly wrinkled enough. So I'm not quite sure what I should be lecturing you on."
That was it. I was going to pass a law against people making deductions before lunch. ~ Brittany Cavallaro,#NFDB
465:I frequently lecture on the dangers of misusing time. People often ask me afterward about what I feel is the biggest waste of time, suspecting that I will say something like television or arguing politics. I think the biggest waste of time is feeling sorry for yourself. That and traffic. Thankfully I found a way out of that one.” -Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1972 The ~ Nathan Van Coops, #NFDB
466:Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
467:And how long an activity lasts seems to have little influence on our recollections at all—two weeks of vacation, Kahneman noted in a 2010 TED lecture, won’t be recalled with much more fondness or intensity than one week, because that extra week probably won’t add much new material to the original memory. (Never mind that the experiencing self might really enjoy that extra week of vacation.) ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
468:So you didn’t tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . .” “Because experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There’s only one thing that’s universal.” “What’s that?” “The truth. ~ Chris Crutcher, #NFDB
469:Five hours after presenting a ...lecture on cancer before an audience of about 400 in L.A., the windshield was shot out of my car on the road back to San Francisco. The next night the glass window in the tailgate (the back window) was shot out (300 miles removed from the first shooting)...The late Arthur T. Harris, MD, was threatened by two men with assassination if he continued to use Laetrile. ~ Ernst T Krebs, #NFDB
470:Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), (October 1972): pp. 859–866., #NFDB
471:The last guest lecturer to honor the students with her presence had been Isabelle Lightwood. And the 'lecture' had consisted of a stern and humiliating warning that every female in a ten-mile radius should keep her grubby littler hands off Simon's hot bod.
Fortunately, the tall, dark-haired man who strode to the front of the classroom looked unlikely to have any interest in Simon or his bod. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
472:So Caldwell delivers her lecture. Not to Elizabeth Blackburn, Günter Blobel or Carol Greider, but to a ten-year-old girl. That’s humbling, in a way. But only in a way. Caldwell is still the one who made all the connections and found what was there to be found. Who entered the jungle and brought the hungry pathogen back alive. Ophiocordyceps caldwellia. That’s what they’ll call it, now and for ever. As ~ M R Carey, #NFDB
473:The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
474:(Actually, languages can be very tricky in this respect. The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive but none in which a double positive makes a negative—to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah. ~ Steven H Strogatz, #NFDB
475:The first mirror-touch synesthete was discovered by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London. Blakemore was delivering a lecture in which she mentioned anecdotal accounts of people who could feel other people being touched on their own bodies. At the end of the lecture, a puzzled woman in the audience came up to her and said, “Isn’t it normal to feel other people’s touch? ~ Helen Thomson, #NFDB
476:Why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary? The answer, I think, lies not in the perceive virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day... The broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture... turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn. ~ Salman Khan, #NFDB
477:The increasing price of oil is just the start. Consider the fact that when oil prices rise, so do gold and platinum. Many reasons are given – the weak dollar, global inflation … except oil prices fluctuate depending on what’s going on in the world. Gold, however, has continually increased in price and shows no sign of stopping …’ Extract from lecture series by Doctor Peter Edgewater, Paris, France ~ Rachel Amphlett, #NFDB
478:So you didn’t tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . .”
Because experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There’s only one thing that’s universal.”
What’s that?”
The truth. ~ Chris Crutcher,#NFDB
479:They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
480:Amy's lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
481:Amy’s lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don’t take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
482:Curiosity is the spark that starts a flirtation - in a bar, at a party, across the lecture hall in Economics 101. And curiosity ultimately nourishes that romance, and all our best human relationships - marriages, friendships, the bond between parents and children. The curiosity to ask a simple question - "How was your day?" or "How are you feeling" - to listen to the answer, and to ask the next question. ~ Brian Grazer, #NFDB
483:I know it's late, but could you find a book for me? It's called The Slavs: Study of Pagan Tradition by Osvintsev."
Barabas sighed dramatically. "Kate, you make me despair. Let's try that again from the top, except this time pretend you are an alpha."
"I don't need a lecture. I just need the book."
"Much better. Little more growl in the voice?"
"Barabas!"
"And we're there. Congratulations! ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
484:People always lecture the poor: "Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!" But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod." That's the part of the analogy that's missing. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
485:Train them to pay attention to their choices. ("Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are good ideas," he would lecture, "but those three concepts should only be the last resort. What you really need to focus on are two other words that also begin with R- Reconsider and Refuse. Before you even acquire the disposable good, ask yourself why you need this consumer product. And then turn it down. Refuse it. You can.") ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
486:You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. ~ Alice Sebold, #NFDB
487:Poem Ending With A Line By George W. Bush
The screening of the film on genocide,
Designed to build momentum for the final
Lecture at the festival of human rights,
Was marred by the projectionist's refusal
To dim the lights in the auditorium.
We looked around, confused, until someone quoted
The president: There's no cave deep enough
For America, or dark enough to hide.
~ Christopher Merrill,#NFDB
488:Some suggest that this cocoon mentality is behind recent campus trends such as "trigger warnings" to alert students that a reading or lecture material might be disturbing and "safe spaces" where students can go if they are upset by a campus speaker's message. One safe space, for example, featured coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies, neatly connecting the idea of safe spaces with that of childhood. ~ Jean M Twenge, #NFDB
489:. This is also true of Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, one of Sartre’s best-known literary works can be shown to embody Nietzsche’s ideas: the ethic of The Flies differs sharply from Sartre’s own Being and Nothingness, finished at the same time, and from his famous lecture, Existentialism Is a Humanism, but contains dozens of echoes of Nietzsche’s writings, and the central motifs of the play are Nietzschean.1 ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
490:I had my usual dream that always followed a big dinner of red meat. You know, the one with the troupe of clowns, the Waffen SS division, and Emily Post. It was getting to the good part, where Ms. Post begins her lecture on table settings. The clowns were getting restless and the SS were asking hard questions about salad forks. Of course, the phone started ringing at that moment. Ms. Post answered the phone. ~ Christopher Bunn, #NFDB
491:Well, maybe it was just that I wasn't going to like anybody because I had to work and I had to explain to my teachers why I wasn't keeping up. I'd fall asleep and things in class and they'd lecture me about the reality of their classroom. I said, 'You want to see my reality?' I opened up my backpack to where you usually keep your pencils. That's where I kept my bills... electric bills, rent... That was my reality. ~ Eddie Vedder, #NFDB
492:A famous Chinese scholar came to America to lecture and during the course of his tour was met at a busy metropolitan railway station by his university host. “If we run quickly, we can catch the next train and save ourselves three minutes,” said the host. The scholar quietly asked, “And what significant thing shall we do with the three minutes that we save by running?” A good question that could not be answered. ~ Warren W Wiersbe, #NFDB
493:Everywhere I looked, I saw students who could listen to an hour-long lecture, asking intelligent questions and writing things down. They turned in homework assignments on time, correctly done. They took a textbook and lecture notes and did something they called “studying.” They were then able to do well on exams. I had no idea how to do any of this. If you’ve never felt this way, it’s hard to express how awful it is. ~ Scott Kelly, #NFDB
494:A vast charitable effort swung into action in order to head off widespread famine: a lecture tour of the United States undertaken by Parnell early in 1880 ensured publicity for the plight of Ireland and generated substantial relief funds; the US government dispatched a supply ship, which docked at Queenstown in the spring of 1880; and ships of the Royal Navy landed relief supplies along the west coast. Significantly, ~ Neil Hegarty, #NFDB
495:Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a “dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets,” he recalled, “ringing the bell and crying out, ‘Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o’clock.”13 ~ David W Blight, #NFDB
496:So you didn’t tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . .”
“Because experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There’s only one thing that’s universal.”
“What’s that?”
“The truth. ~ Chris Crutcher,#NFDB
497:Where the typical conservative argument on poverty falls short is that it often stops right there: Character matters . . . and that’s it. There’s not much society can do until poor people shape up and somehow develop better character. In the meantime, the rest of us are off the hook. We can lecture poor people, and we can punish them if they don’t behave the way we tell them to, but that’s where our responsibility ends. ~ Paul Tough, #NFDB
498:Yeah. The crazy people. The ones who changed after the solar storms."
"We've all changed."
She couldn't argue with that, [...]
"You may have noticed that we - that is, if you are one of us - are no different. Morally, you could make a case that ours is a greater sin, because we're aware of our violent actions." [...]
"You're aware you're giving a morality lecture to a woman you've tied to a chair, right? ~ Scott Nicholson,#NFDB
499:All human beings are moral beings. So, certainly there are alliances. We are in the countries, that are secular states, and we obey its laws. I think we must recognize that common moral base. But in alliances we must always be careful just of what level the alliance is perceived. I will go and lecture to an atheist society, for example, but I will not lecture for them, because I am not an atheist. You see the difference. ~ John Lennox, #NFDB
500:Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.
The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.
Not the Edge lecture again, I said. ~ William Gibson,#NFDB
501:Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion. ~ James Clerk Maxwell, #NFDB
502:believe that any time we tell stories like these that embrace complexity, we are participating in Scripture’s wisdom tradition. We are doing the thing to which all artists are called, which is not to dazzle or instruct or lecture, but to tell the truth—in all its beauty, frustration, and surprise. We might not make $62 million at it, but we are, in the words of Proverbs, “walk[ing] in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:6). ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
503:J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. “Fantasy,” he said in 1939, talking about fantastical prose fiction, “is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
504:Giving his lecture for the third time freed Dr. Lionel Gift from paying much attention to it. He had a naturally expressive style of delivery, hones over the years in elementary-econ lecture halls. He knew, without even thinking, to address the middle rows of the hall, but to occasionally "shoot" the listeners in the back corners. He knew how to make eye contact and solicit the attention of those who were thinking of other things. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
505:(CBI lecture, Dublin, 2008. Speaking on the challenges presented by The Moorehawke Trilogy to the YA reader)
You can't choose any of these characters and say, 'Yes! I'm completely on your side. You are the good guy! You are the one I agree with.' Because at some stage along the way every single one of these characters will let you down. They may not want to. They may have no choice. But they will let you down. ~ Celine Kiernan,#NFDB
506:Don’t lecture Trump. He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals. Trump was a guy who “never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that’s good enough. He’s going to be a billionaire. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
507:Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
508:If she made eye contact now, she’d hear his samples, directionless and at just the right volume. Then more about DESH, and more samples. She had him here for company, though, and not for a lecture. But lectures were all there was to him, aside from his iconics, which were about being blond and fine-boned and wearing clothes more beautifully than any human ever could. He knew everything there was to know about music, and nothing else at all. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
509:Sylvia had given him a scalding lecture, the gist of it being that whatever a woman enjoyed wearing was feminine and anything she didn't enjoy wearing wasn't, and if he was too stubborn and old fashioned to understand that, he could go and soak his head in a bucket of cold water. He hadn't quite forgiven her yet for saying they would have to look hard to find a bucket big enough to fit his head in to, but he admired the sass behind the remark. ~ Anne Bishop, #NFDB
510:There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts. ~ Rafe Esquith, #NFDB
511:Dad himself used to tell a story about one time when Mother went off to fill a lecture engagement and left him in charge at home. When Mother returned, she asked him if everything had run smoothly.
Didn't have any trouble except with that one over there,' he replied. 'But a spanking brought him into line.'
Mother could handle any crisis without losing her composure.
That's not one of ours, dear,' she said. 'He belongs next door. ~ Frank B Gilbreth Jr,#NFDB
512:in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose. ~ Scott Berkun, #NFDB
513:You should make her call you ‘Miss Georgina,’” added Hugh with a mocking southern drawl. “Or at least ‘ma’am.’” Niphon’s presence and Jerome’s lecture had put me in a grouchy mood. “I’m not doing any mentoring. She’s so gungho to take on the world’s male population, she doesn’t even need me.” The three men exchanged more smirks. Cody made some hissing and meowing sounds, scratching at the air. "This isn’t funny,” I said. "Sure it is,” said Cody. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
514:The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severer and more laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve years, he embraced the rigid system of the Stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
515:Always try to solve as much of a problem yourself as is possible. Do not develop the leaning habit. [...] the more we develop the habit of leaning, the weaker we become. [...] web must realize that as a nation or a community develops leaners, it becomes weaker as a whole. Where the person tries to evade the need for personal decision, solution, and responsibility, the result is always weakness. ~ Manly P Hall, Five Mistakes That Can Lead to Tragedy - Lecture Note 082, #NFDB
516:On the other hand, I believe that the theory that space is continuous is wrong, because we get these infinities and other difficulties, and we are left with questions on what determines the size of all the particles. I rather suspect that the simple ideas of geometry, extended down into infinitely small space, are wrong. Here, of course, I am only making a hole, and not telling you what to substitute. If I did, I should finish this lecture with a new law. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
517:You are here,” Annan told the assembled freshmen, “for three reasons: Intellect! Intellect! Intellect!” One, two, three fingers stabbed the air as he counted off the three reasons. Later in his speech he surpassed even that aperçu. “The most important part of your education here will not take place in the lecture rooms or libraries or supervisions,” he intoned. “It will happen when you sit in one another’s rooms, late at night, fertilizing one another. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
518:Human beings are more alike than unalike. Whether in Paris, Texas, or Paris, France, we all want to have good jobs where we are needed and respected and paid just a little more than we deserve. We want healthy children, safe streets, to be loved and have the unmitigated gall to accept love. If we are religious, we want a place to perpetuate God. If not, we want a good lecture every once in a while. And everyone wants someplace to party on Saturday nights. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
519:Why did colleges make their students take examinations, and why did they give grade? What did a grade really mean? When a student "studied" did he do anything more than read and think-- or was there something special which no one in Walden Two would know about? Why did the professors lecture to the students? Were the students never expected to do anything except answer questions? Was it true that students were made to read books they were not interested in? ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
520:Because even if they are doing something immoral, I'd be an idiot to start criticizing them for it if I wasn't perfect myself. Smoking is self-destructive. Drinking is self-destructive. Losing your temper and yelling at people is wrong. Lying is wrong. Cheating is wrong. Stealing is wrong. But people do that stuff all the time. Soon as I figure out how to be a perfect human being, then I'm qualified to go lecture other people about how they live their lives. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
521:Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
522:I rolled my eyes at Kest. We'd heard this lecture many times before, but Trin hadn't, so she stepped right into it.
"Is it really so hard?" She asked
"My dear, not one man in a hundred can be a proper archer. And not one in ten thousand can become a master."
"And you are one? A master archer, i mean?"
Brasti smiled and contemplated the nails of his right hand. "One might fairly say so, i believe."
"One says so frequently," I observed. ~ Sebastien de Castell,#NFDB
523:You should make her call you ‘Miss Georgina,’” added Hugh with a mocking southern drawl. “Or at least ‘ma’am.’”
Niphon’s presence and Jerome’s lecture had put me in a grouchy mood. “I’m not doing any mentoring. She’s so gungho to take on the world’s male population, she doesn’t even need me.”
The three men exchanged more smirks. Cody made some hissing and meowing sounds, scratching at the air.
"This isn’t funny,” I said.
"Sure it is,” said Cody. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
524:The woman in charge of costuming assigned us our outfits and gave us a lecture on keeping things clean. She held up a calendar and said, "Ladies, you know what this is. Use it. I have scraped enough blood out from the crotches of elf knickers to last me the rest of my life. And don't tell me, 'I don't wear underpants, I'm a dancer.' You're not a dancer. If you were a real dancer you wouldn't be here. You're an elf and you're going to wear panties like an elf. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
525:At last the gardener arrived, mumbling something about rascals and country bumpkins, and took me out into the park, giving me a lengthy lecture as he did so. I was instructed to be sober and industrious, and not to wander about aimlessly or waste my time in unproductive activities: if I heeded this counsel, he said, I might in time achieve something. He gave me much other useful and well-phrased advice too, but I have since forgotten almost all of it. ~ Joseph von Eichendorff, #NFDB
526:Bernard: ... By the way, Valentina, do you want credit? - 'the game book recently discovered by.'?
Valentine: It was never lost, Bernard.
Bernard: 'As recently pointed out by.' I don't normally like giving credit where it's due, but with scholarly articles as with divorce, there is a certain cachet in citing a member of the aristocracy. I'll pop it in ad lib for the lecture, and give you a mention in the press release. How's that?
Valentine: Very kind. ~ Tom Stoppard,#NFDB
527:It’s stupid. The teachers don’t really care if you learn anything, just as long as you fill in bubbles on tests. If you get something wrong, they don’t go over it and help you. There might be a lecture, but half of the time we’re reading out of those boring textbooks in class. Half of the stuff doesn’t even matter. Will I ever be held at gunpoint and asked the specific date Eisenhower came into office? Probably not. Better they teach me how to look it up on Google. ~ C L Stone, #NFDB
528:Those who deserve respect are given it freely. If one must demand such a thing, he’ll never truly command it. I am your daughter, not your horse, sir.”
I stepped closer, enjoying the way Father leaned away from me as if he were just now discovering that a cat, while precious and cute, also had sharp claws. “I’d rather be a lowly wretch on the streets than live in a house full of cages. Do not lecture me on propriety when it’s a virtue you so grossly lack. ~ Kerri Maniscalco,#NFDB
529:You want me to stay around?” Win said. “I’m fine.” The car accelerated down Livingston Avenue. “Are those two guys taken care of?” “Gone forever.” Myron nodded. Win watched his face. “They’re called the Twins,” Win said. “The older one with the ascot, he would have bitten off your nipples first. That’s how they warm up. One nipple, then the other.” “I understand.” “No lecture on overreacting?” Myron’s fingers touched down on his chest. “I really like my nipples.” It ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
530:Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form. ~ Robert Floyd, "The Paradigms of Programming", 1978 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 22 (8), August 1979: pp. 455–460., #NFDB
531:It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned back and considered what he might’ve said on the subject. He knew shit. It was his specialty. The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste. Someday he’d give a lecture on the topic. Put on a suit and tie and stand up in front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he knew. Pass out samples, maybe. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
532:It was several decades later that I encountered that footnote, and with it my own ignorance of the Congo’s early history. Then it occurred to me that, like millions of other people, I had read something about that time and place after all: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. However, with my college lecture notes on the novel filled with scribbles about Freudian overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision, I had mentally filed away the book under fiction, not fact. ~ Adam Hochschild, #NFDB
533:I now have faith in those who say they represent a faith. Whereas before I was like, 'Do not give me a lecture on how to live my life when I know I'm a pretty decent human being. I might not go to church every day, but I know I do the right thing or try to. You're going to church and you're still sleeping around on your wife and spending everyone's money. How are you better than I am?' So I've finally met people that walk the walk and it's made me happy, really happy. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
534:It’s depressing at times, but I try to keep a sense of perspective. Sweet F.A. will never be more than a bunch of thugs and vandals, high in nuisance value, but politically irrelevant. I’ve seen them on TV, marching around their “training camps” in designer camouflage, or sitting in lecture theaters, watching recorded speeches by their guru, Jack Kelly, or (oblivious to the irony) messages of “international solidarity” from similar organizations in Europe and North America. ~ Greg Egan, #NFDB
535:My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does , for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some free labor. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
536:What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him.
"I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days." Why, why had he told her? Why? Now she'd rattle down the mountain in her ancient Mercedes that looked like a Nazi staff car, sit in the audience, and ask all the questions that she knew in advance he couldn't answer. ~ Christopher Moore,#NFDB
537:Get the fuck out of my face, Jim." He pushed Rock backwards, fury filling him. "Don't you dare lecture me, you sorry son of a bitch! I have lived out here in this goddamned place without decent iced tea for years. Lived where I couldn't fucking touch you when I wanted to, where I can't even pretend to be your fuckbuddy, much less your lover. Then I'm out with fucking girls so that I could do the one thing I've never once done with you and MARINES jump me because I'm queer! ~ Sean Michael, #NFDB
538:He panted over me, winded by his own absurd lecture. The stench of his alcoholic breath stung my nose. Again I didn’t answer. I hoped he’d tire out and end his speech and hobble back to the living room without touching me. Such hopes were unlikely, as was the case this time.
“Answer me, you good-for-nuthin’ wench!”
The pain bit instantly as his hand connected with my cheek. I shook my head in answer to his crazy questions, feeling a rise of warm tears. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
539:When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
540:Who ever heard of a devout deist? Who ever heard of one who was willing to spend his life in missionary labor for the good of others? It is not according to the constitution of the mind that such a system should awaken the affections. And what is true of this system is true of every false system. All such systems leave the heart cold, and, accordingly, exert very little genuine transforming power over the life. ~ Mark Hopkins, Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846) Lecture V, p. 156, #NFDB
541:Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions:
The first one is: Who started it?
The second is: Are we going to make it?
The third is: Where are we going to put it?
The fourth is: Who's going to clean up?
And the fifth: Is it serious?
Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle. ~ Alan W Watts,#NFDB
542:To the distracting occupations belong especially my lecture courses which I am holding this winter for the first time, and which now cost much more of my time than I like. Meanwhile I hope that the second time this expenditure of time will be much less, otherwise I would never be able to reconcile myself to it, even practical (astronomical) work must give far more satisfaction than if one brings up to B a couple more mediocre heads which otherwise would have stopped at A. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
543:First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough for
them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a
dancing-school; but they didn't know no more how to dance than a kangaroo
does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in and
pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution;
but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and give them a
solid good cussing, and made them skip out. ~ Mark Twain,#NFDB
544:In his lecture on Jesus, Brown meditated on the unlikely paradox that any institution could represent this man because institutions, by their very nature, have to follow particular laws if they are to survive and prosper; and the main law of institutional survival is that the many take precedence over the few. If institutions are to endure they have to place a higher value on their own endurance than on loyalty to individuals, no matter how attractive or charismatic they may be. ~ Richard Holloway, #NFDB
545:I used to think that once we started going out, Derek would change. When I admitted that to Tori, she nearly laughed herself into an aneurysm and gave me a lecture on the stupidity of expecting to change a guy. Maybe I didn’t have her dating experience, but I knew you didn’t go out with someone because you thought you’d change him. That wasn’t what I’d meant. I liked Derek the way he was. I’d just hoped getting closer would mean landing on the sharp side of his tongue less often. ~ Kelley Armstrong, #NFDB
546:He spun toward her so quickly, he almost knocked her back a step. His eyes lit up, making the planes of his face seem almost boyish. “Is it possible it’s referring to St. Paul’s Areopagus sermon?”
Etta returned his eager expression with a blank one.
“Heathen!” Nicholas teased. “Acts 17:16–34. The Apostle Paul gave a sermon—a lecture, in fact, as it was against Greek law to preach about a foreign deity—in Athens, at the Areopagus.”
“I’ll take your word for it. ~ Alexandra Bracken,#NFDB
547:Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the Phonetic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
548:Rose,” she said, leaning toward me. “I’m going to be blunt with you. I’m not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren’t my student anymore, I don’t have the right to ask or tell you anything.” It was like what Adrian had said. “You can lecture,” I told her. “I’ve always respected you and want to hear what you have to say.” The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. “All right, here it is. You screwed up.” “Wow. You weren’t kidding about bluntness. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
549:would step in after one of Jobs’s tantrums. She would go to his office, shut the door, and gently lecture him. “I know, I know,” he would say. “Well, then, please stop doing it,” she would insist. Bowers recalled, “He would be good for a while, and then a week or so later I would get a call again.” She realized that he could barely contain himself. “He had these huge expectations, and if people didn’t deliver, he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t control himself. I could understand why ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
550:It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude ... ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
551:I was coming down off the last painkiller left in my dresser drawer after Autumn tossed my stash. In that moment I was so groggy and happy I would have accepted a date with Oscar the Grouch - and planned to do some serious feeling up on the green furry beast too. Yeah, stooping to pharmaceutical-inspired sex fantasies about garbage can Sesame Street characters - that had to be the best Just Say No drug lecture a girl in a leg cast could ever receive to make her go cold turkey off the meds. ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
552:becomes a song service instead of living at the Father’s pleasure. Fellowship is attending a congregational meeting instead of real friendships with other followers. Teaching is a lecture on Sunday morning, instead of illuminating the next step in someone’s journey. Authority is derived from a position in an institution instead of speaking God’s heart accurately. One can be a good Christian by fitting into a set of expectations and still not know Jesus or the transforming power he gives. ~ Wayne Jacobsen, #NFDB
553:I notice that, in the lecture … which Prof. Lowry gave recently, in Paris … he brought forward certain freak formulae for tartaric acid, in which hydrogen figures as bigamist … I may say, he but follows the loose example set by certain Uesanians, especially one G. N. Lewis, a Californian thermodynamiter, who has chosen to disregard the fundamental canons of chemistry—for no obvious reason other than that of indulging in premature speculation upon electrons as the cause of valency ~ Henry Edward Armstrong, #NFDB
554:My illness has changed me - I've always thought "life is short and I wanna make as much of it as I can," but I really don't have time to mess around. This has really been a wake-up call in terms of what's important, and I'm working hard to figure that out. I need to get better at not doing favors for people all the time. It's hard because there's so many people who have helped me get to the point where I'm in a band that people wanna come see, or where people pay money to see me lecture. ~ Kathleen Hanna, #NFDB
555:Wisconsin was covered several inches deep in snow -- very beautiful, with light ice-floes on the lakes and rivers, and the bare trees and tall grasses like brown feathers against the snow. As the sun set it was reflected in the ice-covered lakes and the light snow -- but all the same I'm glad that most of my [lecture] tour has been in summer and autumn weather. As soon as winter comes there is an extraordinary effect of desolation in these miles upon miles of uninhabited prairies and hills. ~ Vera Brittain, #NFDB
556:Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, A lecture on 'Books' delivered in 1864; the quoted phrase 'glittering generalities' had been used by Rufus Choate to describe the declaration of the rights of man in the Preamble to the Constitution (The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1903-4) Vol. 10, p. 88, note 1), #NFDB
557:The more you lecture those running the companies on how they need to give more breaks to women or other minority groups and be more open-minded to their work products and perhaps question themselves on a double standard, the more some of those people shut down to your messaging. I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying you can very easily get labeled as someone who sees everything through a prism of race or gender or what have you. So we have to walk a fine line. It's sad but it's the truth. ~ Megyn Kelly, #NFDB
558:If I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of psilocybin I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever. The Western mind is particularly phobic of this subject. We have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills, so that they can bungee-cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses—so concerned are we to fulfill society’s need for thrills. But this is something else. It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times, #NFDB
559:The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek." ~ Arthur Compton, #NFDB
560:Covert Operations Report At approximately 0900 hours on Saturday, October 14, Operative Morgan was given a stern lecture by Agent Townsend, a tracking device by Agent Cameron, and a very scary look from Operative Goode. (She also got a tip that her bra strap was showing from Operative McHenry.) The Operative then undertook a basic reconnaissance mission inside a potentially hostile location. (But it wasn't as hostile as Operative Baxter was going to be if everything didn't go according to plan.) ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB
561:Elle avançait dans leur salon et tout était là. À l'identique. Rien n'avait bougé. La couverture toujours sur le canapé. La théière aussi sur la table basse, avec le livre qu'elle était en train de lire. Et fut saisie tout particulièrement par la vision du marque-page. Le livre était ainsi coupé en deux ; la première partie avait été lue du vivant de François. Et à la page 321, il était mort. Que fallait-il faire ? Peut-on poursuivre la lecture d'un livre interrompu par la mort de son mari ? ~ David Foenkinos, #NFDB
562:And if I can’t?” He held up the rope. There was a handle attached to the end. “Do you know what this is?” I did not reply. “It’s a Punjab lasso,” he said as if beginning a lecture. “The Thuggees used it. They were known as the silent assassins. From India. Some people think they were all wiped out in the nineteenth century. Others, well, others are not so sure.” He looked at Katy and held the primitive weapon up high. “Need I go on here, Will?” I shook my head. “He’ll know it’s a trap,” he said. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
563:If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
564:Take, for example, the people who think Elvis is still alive… What’s wrong with this claim? Why is this claim not vitiating our academic departments and corporations? I’ll tell you why, and it’s very simple. We have not passed laws against believing Elvis is still alive. It’s just whenever somebody seriously represents his belief that Elvis is still alive – in a conversation, on a first date, at a lecture, at a job interview – he immediately pays a price. He pays a price in ill-concealed laughter. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
565:They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said, “Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy.” He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
566:Leading and improving! teaching and tutoring! bearing and forbearing! Pah! my husband is not to be my baby. I am not to set him his daily lesson and see that he learns it, and give him a sugar-plum if he is good, and a patient, pensive, pathetic lecture if he is bad. But it is like a tutor to talk of the "satisfaction of teaching." I suppose you think it the finest employment in the world. I don't. I reject it. Improving a husband! No. I shall insist upon my husband improving me, or else we part. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
567:He listened to Dad, who settled into a lecture. “There’s two kinds of them college professors,” Dad said. “Those who know they’re lying, and those who think they’re telling the truth.” Dad grinned. “Don’t know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fide agent of the Illuminati, who at least knows he’s on the devil’s payroll, or a high-minded professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God’s.” He was still grinning. The situation wasn’t serious; he just needed to talk some sense into his son. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
568:Covert Operations Report
At approximately 0900 hours on Saturday, October 14, Operative Morgan was given a stern lecture by Agent Townsend, a tracking device by Agent Cameron, and a very scary look from Operative Goode. (She also got a tip that her bra strap was showing from Operative McHenry.)
The Operative then undertook a basic reconnaissance mission inside a potentially hostile location. (But it wasn't as hostile as Operative Baxter was going to be if everything didn't go according to plan.) ~ Ally Carter,#NFDB
569:A senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
570:Robertson began one lecture with the definition of a sign: “a thing that gives notice of something different from itself.” He next gave examples of natural signs, such as smiling, which indicates joy, and blushing, which speaks of shame. Then, after observing that such signs are universal, Robertson noted this exception: “Politicians and other cunning men of business, [who] by great and refined dissimulation, have in great measure confounded and stifled the natural indications of their inmost thoughts.”28 ~ Lynne Cheney, #NFDB
571:The panic disappeared under those soothing old fingers and the breathing slowed down and stopped hurting the chest as if a fox was caught in it, and then at last Mr. Kroger began to lecture the boy as he used to, Pablo, he murmured, don't ever be so afraid of being lonely that you forget to be careful. Don't forget that you will find it sometimes but other times you won't be lucky, and those are the times when you have got to be patient, since patience is what you must have when you don't have luck. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
572:What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.’ We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.” Nadya ~ Masha Gessen, #NFDB
573:I have a true aversion to teaching. The perennial business of a professor of mathematics is only to teach the ABC of his science; most of the few pupils who go a step further, and usually to keep the metaphor, remain in the process of gathering information, become only Halbwisser [one who has superficial knowledge of the subject], for the rarer talents do not want to have themselves educated by lecture courses, but train themselves. And with this thankless work the professor loses his precious time. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
574:When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
575:Where will the capacity for heaven come from if we have neglected it on earth? A man cannot suddenly walk into a lecture room on higher mathematics and be thrilled by its equations if all during life he neglected to develop a taste for mathematics. A heaven of poets would be a hell to those who never learned to love poetry. And a heaven of divine truth, righteousness, and justice would be a hell to those who never studiously cultivated those virtues here below. Heaven is only for those who work for heaven. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
576:Coming up with lectures is a huge amount of work. I was willing to do one lecture for Gresham because I was honored to have been invited, but to create lectures for a class would probably require that I shut down everything else and concentrate on lectures for a couple of years. Then there would be many, many other skills that I'd have to learn, such as how to sit through a faculty meeting, how to deal with students, etc. It is really not in the cards for me. It's not who I am or what I do. I'm a novelist. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
577:senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
578:A senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
579:I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. ~ William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73 (1889)., #NFDB
580:My close friend was deep in the throes of a book on climate change. She later wrote of hearing 'the great farmer-poet Wendell Berry deliver a lecture on how we each have a duty to love our 'homeplace' more than any other.' When the talk was over, she approached him for guidance. 'I asked him if he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends, who live in our computers and always seem to be shopping for a home. 'Stop somewhere,' he replied. And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place. ~ Kyo Maclear, #NFDB
581:Boring," the director said. "Could we create a little more chemistry?"
Graham gritted his teeth. The guy might be brilliant, but he had an annoying habit of constantly saying "we" when he meant "you", and Graham was pretty sure chemistry wasn't something you could just create anyway; it was either there or it wasn't, and with Olivia, it wasn't. Yet somehow, even though there were two people involved in the kiss, Graham was the only one getting a lecture. Still, he nodded gamely, and set himself up to try again. ~ Jennifer E Smith,#NFDB
582:Surely a University is the very place where we should be able to overcome this tendency of men to become, as it were, granulated into small worlds, which are all the more worldly for their very smallness. We lose the advantage of having men of varied pursuits collected into one body, if we do not endeavour to imbibe some of the spirit even of those whose special branch of learning is different from our own. ~ James Clerk Maxwell, "Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics," The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890) Vol.2, #NFDB
583:The conception of list processing as an abstraction created a new world in which designation and dynamic symbolic structure were the defining characteristics. The embedding of the early list processing systems in languages (the IPLs, LISP) is often decried as having been a barrier to the diffusion of list processing techniques throughout programming practice; but it was the vehicle that held the abstraction together. ~ Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, 1975 Turing Award Lecture[2], Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (March 1976): p. 118., #NFDB
584:When we wonder why the language of tradition Christianity has lost its liberation power for nuclear man, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that man sees himself as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when man's historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian message seems like a lecture about the great pioneers to a boy on an acid trip. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
585:October— You were sleeping so peacefully that I was loath to wake you. Duke Torquill, after demanding to know what I was doing in your apartment, has requested that I inform you of his intent to visit after ‘tending to some business at the Queen’s Court.’ I recommend wearing something clinging, as that may distract him from whatever he wishes to lecture you about this time. Hopefully, it’s your manners. You are truly endearing when you sleep. I attribute this to the exotic nature of seeing you in a state of silence. —Tybalt ~ Mira Grant, #NFDB
586:minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. It’s why we stayed a long time and laughed as much as we could. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
587:At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." ~ Glenn Ligon, #NFDB
588:ce qui diffère essentiellement entre un livre et un ami, ce n’est pas leur plus ou moins grande sagesse, mais la manière dont on communique avec eux, la lecture, au rebours de la conversation, consistant pour chacun de nous à recevoir communication d’une autre pensée, mais tout en restant seul, c’est-à-dire en continuant à jouir de la puissance intellectuelle qu’on a dans la solitude et que la conversation dissipe immédiatement, en continuant à pouvoir être inspiré, à rester en plein travail fécond de l’esprit sur lui-même. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
589:We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway. ~ Stephen Leacock, #NFDB
590:As students, we took all of this for granted, like oxygen in a lecture hall, and we heaped harsh judgment on the Christian West,” John recalled. “But we rarely asked, ‘Compared to what?’ The ‘what’ was always some form of utopian ideal. But utopian ideals have not fared so well. In the twentieth century, secular utopian idealists presided over the extermination of a hundred million people, killed for ‘a higher good’ by the apostles of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. History has never produced a more efficient set of butchers. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
591:As you know, I have always been curious about our immortality... how it feels to live on and on through time....I need speculate no longer, I have sampled eternity in Miss Campbell's fifth period "social studies" class. Three days on the concept of "manifest destiny," Vasile. THREE DAYS. I yearned to stand up, rip her lecture notes from her pallid hands, and scream, 'Yes, America expanded westward! Is that not logical, given that Europeans settled on the Eastern shore? What else were they to do? Advance vainly into the sea? ~ Beth Fantaskey, #NFDB
592:This horror had many other causes as well. But before going further, we must avoid a misunderstanding: don’t think that it was overwhelming. As I have already said, we lived. What I mean is, we worked, ate, conversed, slept and at times even laughed – even if the laughter was rare. The horror appeared to be outside us, inherent in things. We could distract ourselves for moments at a time, becoming involved in a lecture, a conversation, a love affair; but we’d always return to ourselves and realize that it had not left us. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
593:Do you always travel alone like that?” “Uh-huh.” “You enjoy solitude?” she asked, leaning her cheek on her hand. “Traveling alone, eating alone, sitting off by yourself in lecture halls …” “Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.” The tip of one earpiece in her mouth, sunglasses dangling down, she mumbled, “‘Nobody likes being alone. I just hate to be disappointed.’ You can use that line if you ever write your autobiography.” “Thanks,” I said. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
594:que ce qui diffère essentiellement entre un livre et un ami, ce n’est pas leur plus ou moins grande sagesse, mais la manière dont on communique avec eux, la lecture, au rebours de la conversation, consistant pour chacun de nous à recevoir communication d’une autre pensée, mais tout en restant seul, c’est-à-dire en continuant à jouir de la puissance intellectuelle qu’on a dans la solitude et que la conversation dissipe immédiatement, en continuant à pouvoir être inspiré, à rester en plein travail fécond de l’esprit sur lui-même ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
595:I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere,--for I have had a little experience in that business,--that there isa desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country,--and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as an audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
596:I once gave a lecture in which I publicly denied the existence of God. I said: “I want to emphatically affirm today that God does not exist. In fact, if He did exist, I would stop believing in Him.” If anything ever sounded like a nonsense statement, that was it. But I simply meant that God is not in a state of becoming. He is in a state of pure being. If He were in a state of existence, He would be changing—at least according to the way this term is used in philosophy. He would not be immutable. He would not be the God we believe in. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
597:Loafe with me on the grass.... loose the stop from
your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want.... not custom
or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer
morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently
turned over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your
tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till
you held my
feet. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
598:The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly! ~ Konrad Lorenz, #NFDB
599:The panic disappeared under those soothing old fingers and the breathing slowed down and stopped hurting the chest as if a fox was caught in it, and then at last Mr. Kroger began to lecture the boy as he used to, Pablo, he murmured, don't ever be so afraid of being lonely that you forget to be careful. Don't forget that you will find it sometimes but other times you won't be lucky, and those are the times when you have got to be patient, since patience is what you must have when you don't have luck. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio") ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
600:Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing’s slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this “epicist of the female experience,” as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we’re born into; all of us, male and female, are “part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself. ~ Kate Bolick, #NFDB
601:If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence),” Tolkien said in that same 1939 lecture, “then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish.” It turns out he was half right. Many Americans now are in a state in which they don’t want to know or can’t perceive factual truth, yet the perishing of fantasy featuring elves and orcs and superheroes and zombies and angels is nowhere in sight. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
602:Every description is calculated for what it reveals, both about the character to whom it refers and the person whose attitude it represents ... As always in these descriptions, she has a knack for the unexpected word: tropical fish in a mural swim “insanely,” and the apple trees on Pepper Street produce “wry unpalatable fruit.” In “Notes for a Young Writer,” a lecture on writing fiction composed as advice to her daughter Sarah, Jackson would relish the “grotesque effect” of the “absolutely wrong word”: “ ‘I will always love you,’ he giggled. ~ Ruth Franklin, #NFDB
603:The Dalai Lama once said that every human being has two fundamental desires: to be happy and free of pain. I'm interested both in helping people and myself achieve these and also, in the process, finding out what our full potential is as human beings. In essence, there's so much unconsciousness about how/what we eat and how we live which creates the problems that people face. I see so many sick and suffering people when I go on my lecture tours and, if I can help someone find their way back to a life worth living, that's a good day's work. ~ Patrick Holford, #NFDB
604:There is no good talking to him," said a Dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; "no good at all, for he has gone away." "Well, that is his loss, not mine," answered the Rocket. "I am not going to stop talking to him merely because he pays no attention. I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." "Then you should definitely lecture on Philosophy," said the Dragon-fly. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
605:I need to be more in the moment, like when I was wet and wild in the waves. Being in the moment—right now!—equals freedom. It can't be scrutinized, analyzed, rhapsodized, mythologized. It
can't be desecrated, debated, prognosticated. Right now can only be lived. Isn't this the same message I
tried to get across to the kiddies in the lecture that got me fired? Isn't this the same advice Gladdie gave me right before she died?
Why is it that the most fundamental life lesson—LIVE!—is the one I continually forget to put into practice? ~ Megan McCafferty,#NFDB
606:At the heart of his lecture was a definition of his understanding of the calling of a lawyer. “As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.” Here Lincoln offered his most practical advice: “Discourage litigation.” Life in the frontier states was marked by disputes. Rural and townsfolk were ready to “go to law” over the least aggravation. Lincoln’s counsel: “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often the real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time. ~ Ronald C White Jr, #NFDB
607:The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russell pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russell replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
608:He was not up to the lecture he’d get from Ben, and he couldn’t call Ben without telling him he was headed to a midnight showdown with Anderson Layne. Not that Kitty wouldn’t lecture him, but the lecture would somehow be easier to take from her. Because you don’t have a lifetime of history with Kitty. When Kitty says you’re being reckless, you tell yourself she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and that she’s just being shrill. When Ben says you’re being reckless, you can’t ignore him because he knows you very, very well. And he’s usually right. ~ Carrie Vaughn, #NFDB
609:I get very upset when I’m giving a lecture and I’m not interrupted every few sentences by questions. My style is such that that happens very rarely. That’s my technique. I’m really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active. Plato used the metaphor that in teaching...there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It’s something that’s kindled because of the proximity to the heat. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
610:Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of our foreign exchange, was being spent on the war. I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
611:October—
You were sleeping so peacefully that I was loath to wake you. Duke Torquill, after demanding to know what I was doing in your apartment, has requested that I inform you of his intent to visit after ‘tending to some business at the Queen’s Court.’ I recommend wearing something clinging, as that may distract him from whatever he wishes to lecture you about this time. Hopefully, it’s your manners.
You are truly endearing when you sleep. I attribute this to the exotic nature of seeing you in a state of silence.
—Tybalt
~ Seanan McGuire,#NFDB
612:The seductive inducements to conformity - money, celebrity, prizes, grants, book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions, and a public platform - are scored by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel down before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
613:General McMaster was going to get two hours with Trump. Bannon met with him at Mar-a-Lago and offered his usual advice: Don’t lecture Trump. He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals. Trump was a guy who “never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that’s good enough. He’s going to be a billionaire. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
614:METAPHYSICAL LECTURE 1
It has been said that after undergoing certain ordeals — whether ecstatic or abysmal — we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied: our names linger long after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. Not that there was ever much to begin with — only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about like snowflakes in a gray and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void. ~ Thomas Ligotti,#NFDB
615:Hail, Columbia! Home of the six inch cockroach and the stadium-sized lecture hall. A reservation for rich white people guarded by poor brown people in a sea of urban decay. Where nobody on the faculty has ever spent ten minutes in the freshman dorm, but everybody talks about humanism and compassion. They teach you that military people are scum, trash, the lowest of the low -- and then they assign Homer's ILIAD just to develop your sense of irony. Where else can you see three suicides a month dismissed as "slightly above average, but better than Smith or Brown? ~ Ted Rall, #NFDB
616:It has been said that D. M. Lloyd-Jones wasn’t always excited by people taking notes on his sermons. He felt that that was more appropriate to a lecture. The job of the preacher, he believed, was to make the knowledge live. Lloyd-Jones and Edwards believed preaching should aim to make an impression on the listener, and that impression is more important than “information takeaways.” I would say that it’s fine if listeners are taking notes in the first part of the sermon, but if they are doing so at the end, you are probably not reaching their affections. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
617:Eight-year-old Jimmy comes home from school with a note from his teacher that says, “Jimmy stole a pencil from the student sitting next to him.” Jimmy’s father is furious. He goes to great lengths to lecture Jimmy and let him know how upset and disappointed he is, and he grounds the boy for two weeks. “And just wait until your mother comes home!” he tells the boy ominously. Finally he concludes, “Anyway, Jimmy, if you needed a pencil, why didn’t you just say something? Why didn’t you simply ask? You know very well that I can bring you dozens of pencils from work. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
618:All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
619:Be sensible. We make mistakes; what of that? That is all in fun. They go so crazy over their past sins, moaning and weeping and all that. Do not repent! After having done work, do not think of it. Go on! Stop not! Don’t look back! What will you gain by looking back? He who knows that he is free is free; he who knows that he is bound is bound. What is the end and aim of life? None, because I know that I am the Infinite. If you are beggars, you can have aims. I have no aims, no want, no purpose. I come to your country, and lecture — just for fun. (II. 470-71) A ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
620:It turns out that there is only one other person known to have this extraordinary, and rare, combination of synesthesia and color blindness. He is Spike Jahan and he is a student of Ramachandran. Jahan approached Ramachandran shortly after he had attended a lecture on synesthesia. He told Ramachandran that he was color blind and had trouble distinguishing reds, greens, browns and oranges. He also had number-color synesthesia. However, the colors Jahan saw in his mind were tinged with colors that he had never seen in the real world. He called them “Martian colors. ~ Helen Thomson, #NFDB
621:I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher - a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
622:The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing "Getting to Know You" - both verses. At the request of the dean the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, "Fine," and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. ~ Lorrie Moore, #NFDB
623:I’m here to stay. I’ll wait in this waiting room if you want, but I will not leave this hospital without you. I love you, and whatever you go through, I go through. We will do this together, Brady. You no longer have the option to do this alone,” I lecture. His eyes stay on mine, but my Brady isn’t there. There’s a hollow shell of a man in front of me. “You can ignore me, push me away, and yell at me, but I’ll come back to you every time to stand by your side. I’ll hold your hand, hug your body, and soothe your worries, but I will not walk away. I will not leave you, ~ Michelle Lynn, #NFDB
624:I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
625:Sanders truly believed in these barbaric techniques. He held conferences, and even wrote a book called Psychic Driving—you can still find a copy now and then. The most illustrious doctors came to hear him lecture. It was at that point, at the beginning of the 1950s, that the CIA got in touch with him. The agency was strongly interested in his techniques and his writings. It secretly integrated him into Project MK-Ultra, and for years provided the funding for him to pursue his brainwashing experiments at the hospital. And that’s how MK-Ultra entered Canadian territory. ~ Franck Thilliez, #NFDB
626:Look who's talking,' Darren repeated, angrier this time. 'I might've welcomed her along in hunts, but I wasn't tripping over myself to talk to her every night. Everyone could see the way you looked at the girl. You weren't exactly subtle, you know. Ruth nearly had kittens every time the two of you went off to do something. So don't lecture me about getting attached, Zeke. You were falling for that vampire - we all knew it. Maybe you'd better check your own neck before you go pointing fingers at other people. Seems to me the vampire could've bitten you anytime she wanted - ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
627:My dear Sir.
Yours of the 13th. is just received. My engagements are such that I can not, at any very early day, visit Rock-Island, to deliver a lecture, or for any other object.
As to the other matter you kindly mention, I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency. I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.
Let this be considered confidential. Yours very truly,
{Abraham Lincoln} ~ Abraham Lincoln,#NFDB
628:We think when we go abroad we’ll be free, but we’re not. Wherever there are Chinese, it’s there, like a great hydra. Its tentacles stretch into student digs, university lecture halls, Chinese restaurants. All smiles, offering banquets and cash, it slips into foreign institutions. For Chinese there’s no escape. It’s in the food, in the tea, in the air. You find it in a nod or a whisper, a tap on the arm, a few careless words marked on your file in the Chinese Embassy. The Chinese Communist Party, the most powerful organization the world has ever known. Old stench in new bottles. ~ Jason Y Ng, #NFDB
629:In A Lecture Room
Away, haunt thou me not,
Thou vain Philosophy!
Little hast thou bestead,
Save to perplex the head,
And leave the spirit dead.
Unto thy broken cisterns wherefore go,
While from the secret treasure-depths below,
Fed by the skyey shower,
And clouds that sink and rest on hilltops high,
Wisdom at once, and Power,
Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly?
Why labor at the dull mechanic oar,
When the fresh breeze is blowing,
And the strong current flowing,
Right onward to the Eternal Shore?
~ Arthur Hugh Clough,#NFDB
630:will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too—of course I know that; I am not delivering a lecture—to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child,' here my aunt rubbed her nose, 'you must just accustom yourself to do without 'em. But remember, my dear, your future is between you two. No one can assist you; you are to work it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless you both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are! ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
631:[Faculty...] insisted that the lecture and live demonstration was a sacred space. Faculty talked about the importance of debating with students, responding to questions, and presenting a model for how to argue a point and respect differences. They talked about the sanctity of live demonstrations—the importance of doing science in real time. They wanted students to watch live, imperfect lectures and demonstrations and feel part of an in-person community. They say the classroom as a place where you learned to love the 'as-is' of nature as much as you love the 'as-if' of the virtual. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
632:It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too—of course I know that; I am not delivering a lecture—to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child,' here my aunt rubbed her nose, 'you must just accustom yourself to do without 'em. But remember, my dear, your future is between you two. No one can assist you; you are to work it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless you both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are! ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
633:Christianity has been perhaps the single most aggressive force in civilizing human beings in our history. To so brazenly insult those sharing that identity by bringing us down to the level of the Islamic State is an outrage. Christians must of course turn the other cheek in response; there is nothing else to do. But can we be blamed for wondering about Obama’s loyalty to, or even knowledge of, the faith he claims to hold? If instead of defending the civilization Christ inspired he can only mount his high horse to lecture us that we’re no better than the jihadists, what are we to conclude? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
634:I have chosen to talk about one of the founder fathers of twentieth-century physics, Niels Bohr, because in both these respects he was a consummate artist. He had no ready-made answers. He used to begin his lecture courses by saying to his students, ‘Every sentence that I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question’. What he questioned was the structure of the world. And the people that he worked with, when young and old (he was still penetrating in his seventies), were others who were taking the world to pieces, thinking it out, and putting it together. He ~ Jacob Bronowski, #NFDB
635:A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response! ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
636:My family had been denied the things his family had taken for granted. I had a natural talent for selling to people, but without knowledge and resources, where was that going to get me? People always lecture the poor: “Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
637:Then my biggest concern," he was saying, "are the nightmares I'm going to have about all the morgue poems you're going to write. The murder poems. The I made this poison for you, poor swain poems -"
"I have layers," I reminded him. "What if all my poems were about my grandmother?"
"You have a grandmother?"
"I didn't spring whole from the head of Zeus."
"Scary. Pass."
"Kittens, then," I said. We had made it to the steps of my lecture hall. "I could write about kittens. Tulips. My future wedding -"
"Completely terrifying."
I squeezed his elbow. I adored him. ~ Brittany Cavallaro,#NFDB
638:Rahul did not realise the fluttering of the pigeons that so often disturbed everyone in the lab, by darting in and out of the ventilators. He did not realise the long, loud bell that went off, signalling the end of the last lecture, nor did she! They were living in the same moment, the same time, the same feeling, the same thought. Everything had slowed down to that moment. It was as if everything had stopped and all that existed were two people bound to each other by a string of feelings, two young people finally realising what life really meant and what they were supposed to do – love as one! ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB
639:The good must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is wholly clear it is too easy to reject.
What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. But if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate men….There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about.
The world exacts a price for calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few men follow them. The wise give men endless opportunities to discuss what is good. ~ Walter Kaufmann,#NFDB
640:Earth,” he began, ignoring the impulse to open his notes folder and count the words. He knew this lecture by heart.
“Our home. She feeds us, she shelters us. Her gravity prevents us from flying off into space and freezing, before thawing out again and being crisped by the sun, none of which really matters, as we would have long since asphyxiated.” Artemis paused for laughter and was surprised when it did not arrive. “That was a little joke. I read in a presentation manual that a joke often serves to break the ice. And I actually worked icebreaking into the joke, so there were layers to my humor. ~ Eoin Colfer,#NFDB
641:Sorti de la bibliothèque, il serre sous son bras les trésors empruntés. La lumière des réverbères permet de commencer la lecture dans la rue. La psyché du futur philosophe se nourrit de ce monde inédit, méconnu, inconnu. Camus découvre le formidable pouvoir des mots, la magie de la lecture, l'immense puissance des livres. Rentré chez lui, il pose le volume sur la toile cirée de la table de la cuisine, le place sous le rond de lumière de la lampe à pétrole, l'ouvre et le lit. Le monde autour de lui disparaît; il entre de plain-pied dans un univers qui le sauve. Le livre ramasse le monde des antimondes. ~ Michel Onfray, #NFDB
642:Errol was what Kimbal described as “ultra-present and very intense.” He would sit Elon and Kimbal down and lecture at them for three to four hours without the boys being able to respond. He seemed to delight in being hard on the boys and sucked the fun out of common childhood diversions. From time to time, Elon tried to convince his dad to move to America and often talked about his intentions to live in the United States later in life. Errol countered such dreams by trying to teach Elon a lesson. He sent the housekeepers away and had Elon do all the chores to let him know what it was like “to play American. ~ Ashlee Vance, #NFDB
643:This is the basis for the flipped classroom described by physics professor Eric Mazur in his book Peer Instruction. Mazur doesn’t lecture in his classes at Harvard. Instead, he asks students difficult questions, based on their homework reading, that require them to pull together sources of information to solve a problem. Mazur doesn’t give them the answer; instead, he asks the students to break off into small groups and discuss the problem among themselves. Eventually, nearly everyone in the class gets the answer right, and the concepts stick with them because they had to reason their own way to the answer. ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
644:What is most frightening about Vautrin’s lecture is that his brisk portrait of Restoration society contains such precise figures. As I will soon show, the structure of the income and wealth hierarchies in nineteenth-century France was such that the standard of living the wealthiest French people could attain greatly exceeded that to which one could aspire on the basis of income from labor alone. Under such conditions, why work? And why behave morally at all? Since social inequality was in itself immoral and unjustified, why not be thoroughly immoral and appropriate capital by whatever means are available? The ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
645:Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself of every last wrong. But the spasms of nature are centuries and ages and will tax the faith of short-lived men. Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival. They say, "God may consent, but not forever." The delay of the Divine Justice — this was the meaning and soul of the Greek Tragedy, — this was the soul of their religion. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Fugitive Slave Law", a lecture in New York City (7 March 1854), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904), p. 238, #NFDB
646:cars.” W. Keith Davidson paced in front of the jury box. Turning to face the twelve men and women, he thanked them for their time and attention and provided a brief lecture on the nature of reasonable doubt. The prosecution, he reminded them, had the burden of proving Larry Lee Smith’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Then he launched into an attack on the state’s case. Davidson did his best to frame the facts presented and events described as reflective of Larry Lee’s innocence rather than his guilt. Davidson accused the police of “filtering” and condensing the police interview into a one-page statement. Amanda ~ S R Reynolds, #NFDB
647:I have auditory processing challenges. I often don’t catch what is said and I’m always asking people to repeat themselves. People whispering in a lecture would drive me crazy and I’d have to get up and move somewhere else! She is highly sensitive. She dislikes fireworks, balloons popping, vacuums, and too many people talking. She would say the noise hurts her and makes her feel sick. She hears things more loudly, sees things more clearly and feels things much more than others do. She also can hear what everybody is saying in the house, so we really have to watch what we say! – Siblings of highly sensitive person ~ Tania Marshall, #NFDB
648:You see, religion is really a kind of second womb. It’s designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life. MOYERS: But that’s not the Christian idea of creation and the Fall. CAMPBELL: I once heard a lecture by a wonderful old Zen philosopher, Dr. D. T. Suzuki. He stood up with his hands slowly rubbing his sides and said, “God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature—very funny religion! ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
649:Some people - and I am one of them - hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him to discover, upon his arrival to Cremona, that his lecture was not this Friday but the next. Actually, however, he not only arrived safely but was in time for dinner - a fruit cocktail, to begin with, mint jelly with the anonymous meat course, chocolate syrup with the vanilla ice cream. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
650:officer’s training at the Army’s Aberdeen, Md., Proving Ground, our class received instruction on sophisticated equipment. During one class, I was fascinated by an expensive-looking computer. The instructor bragged that it was able to withstand nuclear and chemical attacks. I was duly impressed. But then the instructor abruptly stopped his lecture and turned to me. “Lieutenant, there will be no eating or drinking in my class,” he snapped. “You’ll have to get rid of that coffee!” “Sure . . . but why?” I inquired meekly. “Because,” he scolded, “a coffee spill could ruin the keyboard.” — JEANNE T. WHITAKER ~ Reader s Digest Association, #NFDB
651:Sitting in a wing-back chair, his long legs stretched out before him, Rothbury nodded slowly at all the appropriate times, elbows on the arms of the chair, long fingers steepled.
And then, possibly because he hadn't had his tea yet, her father's lecture veered wildly off course, delving into the sins of the flesh.
Charlotte nearly groaned. But then she stopped. Quite suddenly, she realized Rothbury had found her gaze in the crack of the door. He knew she was there, listening. He winked.
And for all her past misinterpretations of that particular gesture, she knew without a doubt just what that wink promised. ~ Olivia Parker,#NFDB
652:I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do. ~ Rivka Galchen, #NFDB
653:Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
654:As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
655:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
656:The Seeking of the Master. Musa Najib was asked why he charged a fee from those who came to his sessions; and why he often did not even address his audience. He said: 'I charge for this object lesson: people believe that knowledge must be given freely, and consequently mistake everything which is free for knowledge. I do not always lecture because, among Sufis, “The Master finds the pupil.” The pupil has to be physically present: but he may be absent in every other sense. When I discern that a pupil is “present” then I “find” him, for then his inner call is audible to me, even if it is silent to him.' 'Seek and you will be found. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
657:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever, " said the old lady. "But it turtles all the way down! ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
658:Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things. ~ Richard Hamming, 1968 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 16 (1), January 1969, p. 7, #NFDB
659:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down! ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
660:The fact that students passed him by in uniform and he was standing there in torn jeans and faded old concert T-shirt made me smile. The rebel in me could totally relate.
I stopped in front of him. "They're not going to let you stay in school dressed like that. I got a huge lecture for wearing a black shirt the other day."
He glanced my outfit, which didn't really diverge from my normal fashion, and arched an eyebrow. Black cargo pants, white tank, grey zip-up hoodie, with a blade strapped to my thigh and a dagger in my boot.
"What? Pants are black. Shirt is white. Blade stays." I grinned wider. "Because I'm special. ~ Kelly Keaton,#NFDB
661:One of the most irritating conversations I’ve had is with people who lecture me on how I should behave. Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge. I am tired of the moralizing slow-thinkers who pound me with platitudes like I should floss daily, eat my regular apple, and visit the gym outside of the New Year’s resolution. In the markets the recommendation would be to ignore the noise component in the performance. We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
662:Not babies, perhaps. But I know about young things. Foals, puppies, calves, piglets. Even hunting cats. I know if you want them to trust you, you touch them often when they are small. Gently, but firmly, so they believe in your strength, too.” He warmed to his subject. I’d heard this lecture a hundred times before, usually delivered to impatient stableboys. “You don’t shout at them, or make sudden moves that look threatening. You give them good feed and clean water, and keep them clean and give them shelter from the weather.” His voice dropped accusingly as he added, “You don’t take out your temper on them, or confuse punishment with discipline. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
663:Oh, we solved that long ago!” Rubedo chuckled. “I believe that was Greengallows, Henrik Greengallows? Is that right, my love? Ancient history has never been my subject. A famous case study even reported a method for turning straw into gold! The young lady who discovered it wrote a really rather thin paper—but she toured the lecture circuit for years! Her firstborn refined it, so that she could make straw from gold and solve the terrible problem of housing for destitute brownies.”
“Hedwig Greengallows, my dear,” mused Citrinitas. “Henrik was just her mercurer. Men are so awfully fond of attributing women’s work to their brothers! ~ Catherynne M Valente,#NFDB
664:Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery—the frontier that drives the economies of the future—would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
665:Thanks. And I’ll give Brayden a talking-to so he doesn’t try anything on Thursday.”
My mind was still full of Latin and Shakespeare. “Try what?”
Trey shook his head. “Honestly, Melbourne, I don’t know Trey shook his head. “Honestly, Melbourne, I don’t know how you’ve survived this long in the world without me.”
“Oh,” I said, blushing. “That.” Great. Now I had something else to worry about.
Trey scoffed. “Between you and me, Brayden’s probably the last guy in the world you have to worry about. I think he’s as clueless as you are. If I didn’t care about your virtue so much, I’d actualy probably give him a lecture on how to try something. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
666:I briefly considered giving the Myerson kids the same lecture I’d given the other first graders on the playground:
Unicorns are man-eating monsters. They don’t have wings, they aren’t lavender or sparkly, and you could never catch one to ride without its goring you through the sternum. And even if it somehow managed to miss your major arteries—and it never missed—you’d still die from the deadly poison in its horn. But don’t worry. My great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt Clothilde killed the last one a hundred and fifty years ago.
Except now I guessed it would be more like a hundred and sixty. How time doth fly in a unicorn-free world. ~ Diana Peterfreund,#NFDB
667:Landscape
Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky—as though
all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings. ~ Mary Oliver,#NFDB
668:Okay. So, Koturovic studied the structure of the brain and how much bio-electricity it put out and what frequencies that electricity was on. He moved to London and in 1877 he attended a lecture given by a mathematician named William Clifford who was one of the first people to propose the idea of other dimensions. He noticed—” “Wait,” said Tim. “Other dimensions?” She nodded. “I looked him up. Clifford did a lot of work with concepts like curved space and there being more to the world than just the standard three dimensions. At least a fourth, mathematically speaking, and probably a fifth, sixth, seventh, and so on.” Tim raised an eyebrow but said nothing else. ~ Peter Clines, #NFDB
669:Ideas cannot live outside of people"
[...]
"I don't accept that. The ideas in one lecture by Ikem changed my entire life from a parrot to a man."
"Really?"
"Yes, really. And the lives of some of my friends. It wasn't Ikem the man that changed me. I hardly knew him. It was his ideas set down on paper. One idea in particular: that we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking."
"Ok," said Beatrice bowing to this superior, unstoppable passion. "I have also felt what you are saying, though I knew him too as a man. You win! People and Ideas, then. We shall drink to both of them. ~ Chinua Achebe,#NFDB
670:So she hadn't completely lost her sense of propriety -- and for some reason he was glad of that. Yet even as he looked at her, there was that mischievous sparkle in her eyes again despite her protest.
A sparkle. An odd light as incongruous as her red hair.
No, he was imagining things. But where was the expected admonishment on propriety, the lecture on proper restraint? Just when he thought he understood the lady, knew how to knot up her corset strings and keep her at sixes and sevens, she'd turned the tide on him.
What had she said? You are not a man easily understood.
Perhaps she understood him better than he'd given her credit for. ~ Elizabeth Boyle,#NFDB
671:Woodrow Wilson, that great liberal president of the United States who sought to found the League of Nations, put it this way in a lecture he delivered at Columbia University in 1907: Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
672:This general lack of sleep really got to me. And little can prepare people for how they will react when deprived of it--over multiple days. Everything suffers: concentration, motivation, and performance. All key elements for what we were doing. But it is designed that way. Break you down and find out what you are really made of. Underneath the fluff.
I remember during one particular lecture (on the excruciatingly boring topic of the different penetration abilities of different bullets or rounds), looking over to my left and noticing Trucker jabbing his arm with a safety pin every few minutes in an attempt to keep himself awake.
The sight cheered me up no end. ~ Bear Grylls,#NFDB
673:Every day Lombardi heard Cox lecture on the meaning of character—“an integration of habits of conduct superimposed on temperament, the will exercised on disposition, thought, emotion and action.” It was man’s obligation, Cox said, to use his will “to elicit the right and good free actions and to refrain from wrong and evil actions.” While man was blessed with intellect and free will, he was ennobled only when he sublimated individual desires “to join others in pursuit of common good.” Cox lamented that the modern world was turning away from that notion, and “the vaunted liberty which was to make us free has eventuated in a more galling servitude to man’s lower nature. ~ David Maraniss, #NFDB
674:For example, the first time Aunt B came to the Pack Council, he took it upon himself to lecture her about how men should be men and women should be women, and Clan alphas should be men with women helping them, not the other way around."
I laughed. "What did she do?"
"She patted his shoulder and said, 'Bless your heart, you must be awful in bed.'"
Ha!
"Then she turned to Martha and told her that if she ever was in need of a man who respected women enough to think they were human beings she had several available in her clan."
That sounded like Aunt B.
"Mahon turned purple and didn't say another word through the whole Council meeting. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
675:Gifts are very useful to con men. Gifts create a feeling of debt, an itchy anxiety that the recipient is eager to be rid of by repaying. So eager, in fact, that people will often overpay just to be relieved of it. A single spontaneously given cup of coffee can make a person feel obligated to sit through a lecture on a religion they don't care about. The gift of a tiny, wilted flower can make the recipient give to a charity they dislike. Gifts place such a heavy burden that even throwing away the gift doesn't remove the debt. Even if you hate coffee, even if you didn't want that flower, once you take it, you want to give something back. Most of all, you want to dismiss obligation. ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
676:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Harold Abelson, Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #NFDB
677:The diorama was even more enthralling than Annabelle had hoped it would be. However, she wasn’t able to lose herself in the unfolding spectacle—she was too acutely aware of the man standing beside her. It hardly helped that he occasionally bent down to murmur some inappropriate comment in her ear, mockingly reproving her for displaying such unseemly interest in the sight of gentlemen dressed in pillow-cases. No matter how sternly Annabelle tried to hold back her amusement, a few reluctant giggles escaped, earning disapproving glances from people around them. And then, naturally, Hunt chided her for laughing during such an important lecture, which made her want to giggle all the more. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
678:La lecture répétée du Qorân peut très certainement “ouvrir” beaucoup de choses, mais, bien entendu, à la condition d’être faite dans le texte arabe et non pas dans des traductions. Remarquez d’ailleurs que, pour cela et aussi pour certains écrits ésotériques, il s’agit là de quelque chose qui n’a aucun rapport avec la connaissance extérieure et grammaticale de la langue ; on me citait encore l’autre jour le cas d’un Turc qui comprenait admirablement Mohyid-din [Ibn Arabi], alors que de sa vie il n’a été capable d’apprendre convenablement l’arabe même courant ; par contre, je connais des professeurs d’El-Azhar qui ne peuvent pas en comprendre une seule phrase !
Le Caire, 26 juin 1937. ~ Ren Gu non,#NFDB
679:The poet, when he wrote "Thou wilt come no more, gentle ANNIE," was clearly laboring under a mistake. If he had written "Thou wilt be sure to come again next season, gentle ANNIE," he would have hit it. Lecture committees know this. Miss DICKINSON earns her living by lecturing. Occasionally she takes a turn at scrubbing pavements, or going to hear WENDELL PHILLIPS on "The Lost Arts," or other violent exertion, but her best hold is lecturing. She has followed the business ever since she was a girl, and twenty-four (24) years of steady application have made her no longer a Timid Young Thing. She is not afraid of audiences any more. It is a favorite recreation of the moral boot-blacks and pious ~ Various, #NFDB
680:Alex leaned over and treated me to a Rhett Butler kiss, slow and deep but not too sweet. He once told Scarlett something to the effect of how badly she needed kissing, and by someone who knew what he was doing. Alex knew what he was doing. By the time he finished proving it, I was breathless. I rested my head on his shoulder, basking in his warmth and filling my lungs with his scent. "What was that for?"
"That was to show you how glad I am that we got out of that mess in one piece and that we're here together." He extracted his arm from around my shoulders and sat back. "Now let's talk about your crazy stunt."
Damn it, Rhett did that, too. He'd kiss Scarlett silly, then lecture her. ~ Suzanne Johnson,#NFDB
681:I realized that it was very hard to be careful about something if you had no idea what it was, so I made the mistake of asking about manchineel. Unfortunately, this was just the excuse Frank needed to launch himself into a full-blown Nature Lecture. He gave me a very happy nod. “You have to watch out for that one,” he said brightly. “Because it is deadly. Even just touching it will burn your skin. I mean, blisters and everything, and you will definitely require medical attention. So watch for it—it’s a tree, and the leaves are kind of oval and waxy, and it’s got, um—the fruit looks kinda like apples? But Do Not Eat It! It will absolutely kill you, and even touching it is dangerous, so—” This ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
682:Published mathematical papers often have irritating assertions of the type: “It now follows that…,” or: “It is now obvious that…,” when it doesn't follow, and isn't obvious at all, unless you put in the six hours the author did to supply the missing steps and checking them. There is a story about the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, whom we shall meet later. In the middle of delivering a lecture, Hardy arrived at a point in his argument where he said, “It is now obvious that….” Here he stopped, fell silent, and stood motionless with furrowed brow for a few seconds. Then he walked out of the lecture hall. Twenty minutes later he returned, smiling, and began, “Yes, it is obvious that….” If he ~ John Derbyshire, #NFDB
683:We imagine we’ll hear history when it calls. When it doesn’t, we return to our daily lives, our moral mettle still intact. But maybe history doesn’t call, or maybe you have to be listening closely to hear it. To prioritize diversity over perceived merit—the colorblind assessment of ability that has never really been colorblind at all—is to recognize that strategic imperatives can’t be the sole benchmark by which we distribute society’s prizes. There’s an increasing sense—among the millennials who fill our lecture halls, but out in the rougher world of cubicles and delivery vans and hospital waiting rooms as well—that it’s not enough to be right, or profitable, or talented. You must also be just. It’s ~ Joichi Ito, #NFDB
684:It seems to me that, very strikingly here, is borne out the general acceptance that ours is only an intermediate existence, in which there is nothing fundamental, or nothing final to take as a positive standard to judge by. Peasants believed in meteorites. Scientists excluded meteorites. Peasants believe in "thunderstones." Scientists exclude "thunderstones." It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields, and that scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms. We cannot take for a real base that, as to phenomena with which they are more familiar, peasants are more likely to be right than are scientists: a host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against us. ~ Charles Fort, #NFDB
685:There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. ~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 1, #NFDB
686:Ainsi notre cœur change, dans la vie, et c’est la pire douleur; mais nous ne la connaissons que dans la lecture, en imagination: dans la réalité il change, comme certains phénomènes de la nature se produisent, assez lentement pour que, si nous pouvons constater successivement chacun de ses états différents, en revanche la sensation même du changement nous soit épargnée.
Trans. The heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change. ~ Marcel Proust,#NFDB
687:The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger! ~ Richard Feynman, Lecture 1. "Photons: Corpuscles of Light" (1979) Sir Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, University of Auckland., #NFDB
688:Even before my grandmother could beat or punish me for one thing or another, before my father could sit me down to lecture me about my defiant disobedience, I was already hemorrhaging internally from dragging myself through my own mental and emotional bloodbath. Years of beatings and lectures and punishments had taught me not only that was I untrustworthy but also that I should not and could not trust my own instincts. I carried those thoughts and feelings—a sense of myself as shameful, guilty, and wrong—well into adulthood. In the process, I gave others way too much space and authority to define me and determine my choices, because what I wanted didn’t matter and I could not trust myself to make good choices. ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
689:Michael Faraday, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, was born in south London in 1791. He was self-educated, leaving school at fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder. He engineered his own lucky break into the world of professional science after attending a lecture in London by the Cornish scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1811. Faraday sent the notes he had taken at the lecture to Davy, who was so impressed by Faraday’s diligent transcription that he appointed him his scientific assistant. Faraday went on to become a giant of nineteenth-century science, widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. Davy is quoted as saying that Faraday was his greatest scientific discovery. ~ Brian Cox, #NFDB
690:Birds are the most common,” Vosch says. He’s absently running his finger over the button marked EXECUTE. “Owls. During the initial phase, when we were inserting ourselves into you, we often used the screen memory of an owl to hide the fact from the expectant mother.” “I hate birds,” I whisper. Vosch smiles. “The most useful of this planet’s indigenous fauna. Diverse. Considered benign, for the most part. So ubiquitous they’re practically invisible. Did you know they’re descended from the dinosaurs? There’s a very satisfying irony in that. The dinosaurs made way for you, and now, with the help of their descendants, you will make way for us.” “No one helped me!” I screech, cutting off the lecture. “I did it all myself! ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
691:These are early days, Trot, and Rome was not built in a day, nor in a year. You have chosen freely for yourself and you have chosen a very pretty and very affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too – of course I know that; I am not delivering a lecture – to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child, you must just accustom yourself to do without ‘em. But remember, my dear, your future is between you two. No one can assist you; you are to work it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless you both in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are! ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
692:Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the lecture halls, but far from numerous the young people who genuinely thirst for truth and justice. Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few.
We all know that, so why complain? Was it not always thus and will it not always thus remain? Certainly, and one must take what nature gives as one finds it. But there is also such a thing as a spirit of the times, an attitude of mind characteristic of a particular generation, which is passed on from individual to individual and gives its distinctive mark to a society. Each of us has to his little bit toward transforming this spirit of the times. ~ Albert Einstein,#NFDB
693:And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer. I’m sure some of you do not like lecture classes, but as you have probably noted, I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to spend my remaining breath chatting with you about the finer points of Islamic history, but our time together is short. I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it? ~ John Green, #NFDB
694:The thought occurred to me that I was in danger of becoming a slave to a tiger as well. Hah! I’d probably like it too. I rolled my eyes at the thought. I disgust myself. I’m so darn weak! I hated the idea that all he’d have to do was crook his finger at me, beckon me to come to him, and I probably would. The fiercely independent side of me flared up. That’s it! No more! I’m going to talk it all out with him when we get back and hope that we can still be friends.
This was pretty much my line of thought for the entire trip home. I’d daydream and then stop, lecture myself, and repeat my stubborn mantra. I tried to read, but I kept rereading the same paragraph over and over. Eventually, I gave up and napped a little. ~ Colleen Houck,#NFDB
695:We can discuss the case and you can lecture me, and I will continue to, how do you say it, straighten you out? Vypravlyat?” “You are going to straighten me out?” said Nate, pulling her close. “I’m the handler here. I’m sure you remember.” “In some circumstances I become the handler,” said Dominika, lifting his T-shirt over his head. “And yes, I will straighten you out.” She deftly pulled the drawstring of his trousers, lifted her skirt, and sat back on his lap, wiggling to seat herself more deeply on him. “Are you straightened out?” she whispered. She rocked back and forth, moaning softly, Nate’s face buried in her bosom. Then the dried-out, flimsy wicker chair fell apart, dumping them on the still-warm marble of the warped little balcony. ~ Jason Matthews, #NFDB
696:October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalization of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise. ~ China Mi ville, #NFDB
697:He was getting addicted to kissing her. He was going to slip up sooner rather than later. Secret-laden smiles as they greeted one another when in company could never be enough; he wanted to fling his arms around her and kiss her whenever she walked into a room. Resting their hands on one another’s knees under the lecture theatre desk was one thing, but he wanted to stroll around campus with his arm thrown across her shoulders, make his lap a pillow for her as she lay and studied in the grassy quad, introduce her to everyone he came across as his girlfriend.
Finding that chain of thought too tender to pursue, Adam kissed her again, found himself wishing into her as if she were a candle he was blowing out. Please, decide that I’m worth it. ~ Erin Lawless,#NFDB
698:After receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918, Max Planck went on tour across Germany. Wherever he was invited, he delivered the same lecture on new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur grew to know it by heart: “It has to be boring giving the same speech each time, Professor Planck. How about I do it for you in Munich? You can sit in the front row and wear my chauffeur’s cap. That’d give us both a bit of variety.” Planck liked the idea, so that evening the driver held a long lecture on quantum mechanics in front of a distinguished audience. Later, a physics professor stood up with a question. The driver recoiled: “Never would I have thought that someone from such an advanced city as Munich would ask such a simple question! My chauffeur ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
699:Even if we take into account only atavism, family likenesses, it is inevitable that the uncle who delivers the lecture should have more or less the same faults as the nephew whom he has been deputed to scold. Nor is the uncle in the least hypocritical in so doing, taken in as he is by the faculty that people have of believing, in every fresh experience, that ‘this is quite different,’ a faculty which allows them to adopt artistic, political and other errors without perceiving that they are the same errors which they exposed, ten years ago, in another school of painters, whom they condemned, another political affair which, they considered, merited a loathing that they no longer feel, and espouse those errors without recognising them in a fresh disguise. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
700:I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn’t thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It’s like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great. ~ Caleb J Ross, #NFDB
701:Boys need to have the courage to fight back!” their mother continued. “If you want to keep on playing with girls all the time, I’m going to have to snip off your weenie!” “Oh!” gasped Masako. “What’s the matter?” said her mother, slightly annoyed at having her lecture interrupted. “I know why Yoshio is afraid of going to the bathroom, and why he always wets his bed! It’s because of what you say when you tell him off for playing with the girls!” “What?” said their mother, looking first to Masako, then to Yoshio. “The scary woman Yoshio sees in the bathroom at night – it’s you, Mum! And the reason she’s always holding scissors is because, well you know, the scissors are for...” Masako watched her mother’s face change as she slowly put the pieces together. ~ Yasutaka Tsutsui, #NFDB
702:I had to ice my face the rest of the weekend and my bruised nose made it look like I got in a fight. Going back to class on Monday wasn't any better.“Hey, Red, how’s the nose doing?” John plopped down in the seat next to me like he didn't have a care in the world.I glared forward, willing myself not to look at him.
“You’re the one who put it there, so if you don’t mind I would like to focus on the lecture since finals are coming up.”The girls in front of us glanced over their shoulders, looks of disgust on their faces.I smirked. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, ladies. I fell ice skating, he’s not beating me or getting me involved in
some weird sex act.”That got them to turn back around. “Since when does sex involve bruises?What kind of stuff are you into,Red? ~ J Lynn,#NFDB
703:one who, though he never digress to read a Lecture, Moral or Political, upon his own Text, nor enter into men’s hearts, further than the Actions themselves evidently guide him…filleth his Narrations with that choice of matter, and ordereth them with that Judgement, and with such perspicuity and efficacy expresseth himself that (as Plutarch saith) he maketh his Auditor a Spectator. For he setteth his Reader in the Assemblies of the People, and in their Senates, at their debating; in the Streets, at their Seditions; and in the Field, at their Battels.
Quoted by Shelby Foote in his The Civil War: A Narrative – Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian, Bibliographical Note, from Thomas Hobbes’ Forward to Hobbes’ translation of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides ~ Thomas Hobbes,#NFDB
704:Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu'il n’apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’eau le sucre. Il n’est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. Écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. ~ Comte de Lautr amont, #NFDB
705:You have chosen freely for yourself'; a cloud passed over her face for a moment, I thought; 'and you have chosen a very pretty and a very affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too - of course I know that; I am not delivering a lecture - to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child,' here my aunt rubbed her nose, 'you must just accustom yourself to do without 'em. But remember, my dear, your future is between you two. No one can assist you; you are to work it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless you both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are!' My aunt said this in ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
706:Tant que la lecture est pour nous l’incitatrice dont les clefs magiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-même la porte des demeures où nous n’aurions pas su pénétrer, son rôle dans notre vie est salutaire. Il devient dangereux au contraire quand, au lieu de nous éveiller à la vie personnelle de l’esprit, la lecture tend à se substituer à elle, quand la vérité ne nous apparaît plus comme un idéal que nous ne pouvons réaliser que par le progrès intime de notre pensée et par l’effort de notre coeur, mais comme une chose matérielle, déposée entre les feuillets des livres comme un miel tout préparé par les autres et que nous n’avons qu’à prendre la peine d’atteindre sur les rayons des bibliothèques et de déguster ensuite passivement dans un parfait repos de corps et d’esprit. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
707:its paradox ingredients gave it great strength. This rope is the same, only better!” “Paradox ingredients?” Blitz held up the end of the rope and whistled appreciatively. “He means things that aren’t supposed to exist. Paradox ingredients are very difficult to craft with, very dangerous. Gleipnir contained the footfall of a cat, the spittle of a bird, the breath of a fish, the beard of a woman.” “Dunno if that last one is a paradox,” I said. “Crazy Alice in Chinatown has a pretty good beard.” Junior huffed. “The point is, this rope is even better! I call it Andskoti, the Adversary. It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds—Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician’s sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep-fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
708:why humans treat each other so violently. We’ve always known that this violence comes from the urge humans feel to control and dominate one another, but only recently have we studied this phenomenon from the inside, from the point of view of the individual’s consciousness. We have asked what happens inside a human being that makes him want to control someone else. We have found that when an individual walks up to another person and engages in a conversation, which happens billions of times each day in the world, one of two things can happen. That individual can come away feeling strong or feeling weak, depending on what occurs in the interaction.’ I gave him a puzzled look and he appeared slightly embarrassed at having rushed into a long lecture on the subject. I asked ~ James Redfield, #NFDB
709:We want out. In the end, it’s that simple. We want out, where the law is, where you prosper or you fail according to your own merits as a person. Is that so damned much? I don’t want white friends. I don’t want to socialize. You know how white people look to me? The way albinos look to you. I hope never to find myself in a white man’s bed. I don’t want to integrate. I just don’t want to feel segregated. We’re after our share of the power structure of this civilization, Mr. McGee, because, when we get it, a crime will merit the same punishment whether the victim is black or white, and hoods will get the same share of municipal services, based on zoning, not color. And a good man will be thought a credit to the human race. Sorry. End of lecture. The housemaid has spoken. ~ John D MacDonald, #NFDB
710:In 1936, J. R. R. Tolkien delivered a lecture before members of the British Academy entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The wisdom and eloquence of this lecture finally delivered Beowulf from historians, archaeologists, mythologists, linguists—the list is long. Conceding that students of all these disciplines can find much to ponder there, he said, however, that “it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held,” and further remarked that “Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content, and is largely independent even of the most important facts . . . that research has discovered. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
711:Kim called me a slut under her breath in H&P, and Mr. Wallace heard her and gave a lecture on the negative effects of labels, and how words like that serve to limit women’s sexual expression, and how there’s a whole history of words that basically mean slut8 and yet there are no equivalent epithets for men whatsoever, and didn’t that say something about how women are viewed in our culture? He said a more accurate term could be: “a girl who’s using sexuality in an attempt to gain approval from the opposite sex….” Or, if you look at it a different way, “a liberated, open girl who likes boys and feels comfortable expressing affection, but is misunderstood.” Blah blah blah.
I’m sure he meant well, but I wanted to call Kim a megaslut right back and not think about it anymore ~ E Lockhart,#NFDB
712:He gives her his Art History lecture.
‘Then you get Mo-net and Ma-net, that’s a little tricky, Mo-net was the one did all the water lilies and shit, his colors were blues and greens, Ma-net was the one did Bareass on the Grass and shit, his colors were browns and greens. Then you get Bonnard, he did all the interiors and shit, amazing light, and then you get Van Guk, he’s the one with the ear and shit, and Say-zanne, he’s the one with the apples and shit, you get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures, you get my man Mondrian, he’s the one with the rectangles and shit, his colors were red yellow and blue, you get Moholy-Nagy, he did all the plastic thingummies and shit, you get Mar-cel Du-champ, he’s the devil in human form….’
She’s asleep. ~ Donald Barthelme,#NFDB
713:Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worth-while love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance which inspires no sacrifice. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What man has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads men, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronizes the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord say, “Tolerate your enemies!” But He did say, “Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you” (Matt. 5:44). Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature’s animosities. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
714:The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever. ~ Max Horkheimer, #NFDB
715:In 1992, he took over as the Scientific Advisor to the Minister of Defence and secretary, Department of Research and Development, and continued till he was seventy. The country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, was conferred on him in 1997. A year later, in 1998, he led the team that conducted India’s second nuclear tests in Pokhran. Five nuclear tests were conducted consecutively and India became a nuclear power. In 1999, he was appointed principal scientific advisor to the government of India with the rank of a Cabinet minister. By 2001, he was enjoying a teacher’s life at Anna University in Chennai. Meant to lecture a class of sixty, most of his lectures ended up in an overflowing hall with about 200 students instead. In 2002, he was elected the eleventh President of India. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
716:Sunjuice
What happens when the juice of the sun
drenches you
with its lemony tang, its tart sweetness
& your whole body stings with singing
so that your toes sing to your mouth
& your navel whistles to your breasts
& your breasts wave to everyone
as you walk down the summer street?
What will you do
when nothing will do
but to throw your arms around trees
& men
& greet every woman as sister
& to run naked in the spray of the fire hydrants
with children of assorted colors?
Will you cover your drenched skin
with woolen clothes?
Will you wear a diaper of herringbone tweed?
Will you piece together a shroud of figleaves
& lecture at the University
on the Lives of the Major Poets,
the History of Despair in Art?
~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
717:Already the lecture is beginning to interest several dedicated people I know. One person who has promised to come (and bring several sharp friends, too) is a brilliant new contact I made during rush hour on the Jerome Avenue line. His name is Ongah, and he is an exchange student from Kenya who is writing a dissertation at N.Y.U. on the French symbolists of the 19th cent. Of course, you would not understand or like a brilliant and dedicated guy like Ongah. I could listen to him talk for hours. He is serious and does not come on with all of that pseudo stuff like you always did. What Ongah says is meaningful. Ongah is real and vital. He is virile and aggressive. He rips at reality and tears aside concealing veils.
“Oh, my God!” Ignatius slobbered. “The minx has been raped by a Mau-Mau. ~ John Kennedy Toole,#NFDB
718:Over the years, as I listened to the engineering give-and-take over the question of artificial life-forms, I kept coming up against something obdurate inside myself, some stubborn resistance to the definition of “life” that was being promulgated. It seemed to me too reductive of what we are, too mechanistic. Even if I could not quite get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao or some other metaphor for the ineffable spark of life, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists’ claims to be on the path toward the creation of a sentient being, I found myself muttering, No, that’s not right, we’re not just mechanisms, you’re missing something, there’s something else, something more. But then I had to ask myself: What else could there be? ~ Ellen Ullman, #NFDB
719:Years ago I conducted a course in fiction writing at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and we wanted such distinguished and busy authors as Kathleen Norris, Fannie Hurst, Ida Tarbell, Albert Payson Terhune and Rupert Hughes to come to Brooklyn and give us the benefit of their experiences. So we wrote them, saying we admired their work and were deeply interested in getting their advice and learning the secrets of their success. Each of these letters was signed by about a hundred and fifty students. We said we realized that these authors were busy—too busy to prepare a lecture. So we enclosed a list of questions for them to answer about themselves and their methods of work. They liked that. Who wouldn’t like it? So they left their homes and traveled to Brooklyn to give us a helping hand. By ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
720:The subtle experimenter lost his subtlety when he shifted from doing science to proselytizing for God. Rigor slipped to Chautauqua logic and he perpetrated such howlers as the notion that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle somehow extends beyond the dimensions of the atom into the human world and confirms free will. Bohr heard Compton’s Free Will lecture when he visited the United States in the early 1930s and scoffed. “Bohr spoke highly of Compton as a physicist and a man,” a friend of the Danish laureate remembers, “but he felt that Compton’s philosophy was too primitive: ‘Compton would like to say that for God there is no uncertainty principle. That is nonsense. In physics we do not talk about God but about what we can know. If we are to speak of God we must do so in an entirely different manner. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
721:I know it’s late, but could you find a book for me? It’s called The Slavs: The Study of Pagan Traditions by Osvintsev.”
Barabas sighed dramatically. “Kate, you make me despair. Let’s try that again from the top, except this time pretend you are an alpha.”
“I don’t need a lecture. I just need the book.”
“Much better. Little more growl in the voice?”
“Barabas!”
“And we’re there. Congratulations! There is hope for you yet. I will look into the book.”
I hung up the phone and glared at Curran. “What’s so funny?”
“You.”
“Laugh while you can. You have to sleep eventually, and then I’ll take my revenge.”
“You’re such a violent woman. Always with the threats. You should look into some meditation techniques . . .”
I jumped on the couch and put the Beast Lord into an arm-lock. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
722:At the end of my opening lecture in my 1998 course on global health, most students headed for the coffee machine but one remained behind. I saw her wander slowly toward the front of the room with tears in her eyes, then, when she understood that I had noticed her, she stopped, flipped her face away, and looked out the window. She was obviously moved. I expected her to share with me a sad personal problem that was going to impede her participation in the course. Before I could say anything comforting she turned around, gained control over her emotions, and in a steady voice said something completely unexpected: “My family is from Iran. What you just said about the fast improvements in health and education in Iran was the first positive thing I’ve heard anyone from Sweden ever say about the Iranian people. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
723:You enjoy solitude?" she asked, leaning her cheek on her hand. "Traveling alone, eating alone, sitting off by yourself in lecture halls..."
"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.”
The tip of one earpiece in her mouth, sunglasses dangling down, she mumbled, "'Nobody likes being alone. I just hate to be disappointed.' You can use that line if you ever write your autobiography."
"Thanks," I said.
"Do you like green?"
"Why do you ask?"
"You're wearing a green polo shirt."
"Not especially. I'll wear anything."
"'Not especially. I'll wear anything.' I love the way you talk. Like spreading plaster nice and smooth. Has anybody ever told you that?"
"Nobody," I said. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
724:Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
725:Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a Far Rockaway teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took will and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone call, each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie at the new Gem theater on Mott Avenue carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, filling a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life, ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
726:As part of an effort to prod college seniors to get tetanus shots, a group of students was given a lecture meant to educate them about the dangers of tetanus and the importance of getting inoculated against it. A large majority of those students reported that they were convinced and planned to get their shots, but in the end only 3 percent got them. Bu another group of students, who were presented with the same lecture, had a 28 percent inoculation rate. The difference? The second group was given a map of the campus and asked to plan their route to the health center and pick a date and time to go. Sometimes, you see, motivation isn't our problem. Rather, we need to identify life's everyday mental obstacles - regret, fatigue, overconfidence, fear, to name just four - and put ourselves into position to hurdle them. ~ Gary Belsky, #NFDB
727:I followed the chef to the circular herb garden with relief. Here were familiar plants with gentle smells: thyme, dill, mint, basil, and others equally benign. He asked me to identify the ones I knew and gave me a brief dissertation on their uses: Dill was good with fish, thyme complemented veal, mint went well with fruit, and basil was perfect for the dreaded love apples. He plucked two large mint leaves with purplish undersides, placed one on his tongue, and gave me the other. We came to rest on a curved stone bench in the middle of the garden, and we sat there sucking on fresh mint, him enjoying the breeze, and me awaiting the judgement that must be coming.
He continued his lecture on herbs. He talked about the subtlety of bay laurel, the many varieties of thyme, and the use of edible flowers as garnishes. ~ Elle Newmark,#NFDB
728:Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.” ~ Steven Berlin Johnson, "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book," Hearst New Media lecture (April 22, 2010)., #NFDB
729:The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born. ~ Richard Dawkins, from a lecture, extracted from The Nullifidian (December 1994), #NFDB
730:And so Leo and Silver’s beautiful scheme for peacefully detaching the downsiders, hammered out through four secret planning sessions, was blown away on a breath. Wasted was the flattery, the oblique suggestion, that had gone into convincing Van Atta that it was his idea to gather, unusually, the entire Habitat downsider staff at once and make his announcement in a speech persuading them all they were being commended, not condemned . . . The shaped charges to cut the lecture module away from the Habitat at the touch of a button were all in place. The emergency breath masks to supply the nearly three hundred bodies with oxygen for the few hours necessary to push the module around the planet to the transfer station were carefully hidden within. The two pusher crews were drilled, their pushers fueled and ready. Fool ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
731:Enfin, en continuant à suivre du dedans au−dehors les états simultanément juxtaposés dans ma
conscience, et avant d'arriver jusqu'à l'horizon réel qui les enveloppait, je trouve des plaisirs d'un autre genre,
celui d'être bien assis, de sentir la bonne odeur de l'air, de ne pas être dérangé par une visite et, quand une
heure sonnait au clocher de Saint−hilaire, de voir tomber morceau par morceau ce qui de l'après−midi était
déjà consommé, jusqu'à ce que j'entendisse le dernier coup qui me permettait de faire le total et après lequel
le long silence qui le suivait semblait faire commencer, dans le ciel bleu, toute la partie qui m'était encore
concédée pour lire jusqu'au bon dîner qu'apprêtait Françoise et qui me réconforterait des fatigues prises,
pendant la lecture du livre, à la suite de son héros. ~ Marcel Proust,#NFDB
732:Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.
Callum didn’t respond in my head, but I knew he’d gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, “Don’t tread on you?”
“More like ‘don’t metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,’ but it’s the same sentiment, really.”
“Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn.”
“Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?”
He sighed, but I didn’t need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn’t clear, he verbalized it. “You have always, always been a difficult child.”
I smiled sweetly. “I try. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes,#NFDB
733:Percy wakes me (fourteen)
Percy wakes me and I am not ready.
He has slept all night under the covers.
Now he’s eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.
So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter
Where he is not supposed to be.
How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you
Needed me,
To wake me.
He thought he would a lecture and deeply
His eyes begin to shine.
He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.
He squirms and squeals: he has done something
That he needed
And now he hears that it is okay.
I scratch his ears. I turn him over
And touch him everywhere. He is
Wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then
He has breakfast, and he is happy.
This is a poem about Percy.
This is a poem about more than Percy.
Think about it. ~ Mary Oliver,#NFDB
734:5. When in Doubt ::: Read the Syllabus - Read Ahead - Ask Questions: Read the correlated readings (designed to mesh with that lecture) before you come to class. The whole point of correlated readings is to prepare you for the lecture. If the readings are completed at the appropriate time you will have a 'Big Picture' framed by a general narrative and suspended by an ongoing line of argument. These readings should help you establish a set of expectations as well as some unsettling questions. The lectures should help you connect ideas you have read about and, with any luck, they should help you call key issues into question. Your job is to arrive at an understanding you call your own and can defend to a critical audience. Beginning to end, you are the center of your education. You know where to begin. ~ Dr Robert A Hatch, How to Study, #NFDB
735:Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Francis_Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.” ~ Steven Berlin Johnson, "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book," Hearst New Media lecture, April 22, 2010., #NFDB
736:When we peek behind the grinning mask of comic cynicism, we find a frustrated idealist. The comic sensibility wants the world to be perfect, but when it looks around, it finds greed, corruption, lunacy. The result is an angry and depressed artist. If you doubt that, ask one over for dinner. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: “Let’s invite some comedy writers to the party! That’ll brighten things up.” Sure… till the paramedics arrive. These angry idealists, however, know that if they lecture the world about what a rotten place it is, no one will listen. But if they trivialize the exalted, pull the trousers down on snobbery, if they expose society for its tyranny, folly, and greed, and get people to laugh, then maybe things will change. Or balance. So God bless comedy writers. What would life be like without them? ~ Robert McKee, #NFDB
737:Democrats are liberals, and—to their profound embarrassment—liberalism is an old, white European male political philosophy. Liberalism is based on the thought of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and—oh, the shame of it—slave-owning, woman-exploiting Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism is deeply confusing to liberals. America’s first great liberal populist was Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of the genocidal Trail of Tears and annihilator of the Second Bank of the United States and hence of centralized economic control. (Sadly, Jackson put an end to the Second Bank of the United States before Hillary Clinton had a chance to claim large lecture fees for speaking to its executives.) Plus, liberalism is painfully unhip. Say “Great Society” to today’s with-it young Democratic voters and they hear air quotes around the “Great.” LBJ ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
738:I came at her like a snake.
"I am fully done with other people telling me what to do with my history," I said. "My past made me who I am. There is no way to wipe it clean. I am the evidence. If you look at me and see track marks and too-skinny arms and hands that know how to hold a gun and a brain that is sharper and faster than yours, then that is not my problem. Do you hear me? I have regrets, and I have made mistakes, but I am who I am. I'm done pretending that I've wholly remade myself, that I'm going to ... to hie myself away in some lecture hall for the next four years to make you all comfortable." She was backed up against the door, now, her arms wrapped around herself, and I didn't care. "If you want to stop seeing it, you'll have to stop seeing me, and I am not going to disappear. ~ Brittany Cavallaro,#NFDB
739:You are definitely onto a rather large problem,” Csikszentmihalyi told me. He has found discrepancies for women, not only in the actual opportunity to have time for flow but also for allowing themselves to get there in the first place. “When I lecture about flow, in the question-and-answer period, there is always the same question: ‘But doesn’t one feel guilty when you are in flow because you forget everything except what you are doing? Isn’t that giving up on the rest of your responsibilities—giving in to total involvement in what you are doing and not caring about anything or anyone else?’ That question, almost 100 percent of the time, is asked by a woman. It’s clear that it’s much more difficult for women to feel that they can get immersed in something and forget themselves, forget time, forget everything around them.” Csikszentmihalyi ~ Brigid Schulte, #NFDB
740:as “a general endorsement of the exploitative colonization tactics of the Spanish. Though Junipero Serra was known to have argued on behalf of the property rights and economic entitlement of converted Native Americans, he consistently advocated against their right to self-governance, and was a staunch supporter of corporal punishment, appealing to the Spanish government for the right to flog Indians.” When Doc had finished this particular lecture, I just looked at him and went, “Photographic memory much?” He looked embarrassed. “Well,” he said. “It’s good to know the history of the place where you’re living.” I filed this away for future reference. Doc might be just the person I needed if Jesse showed up again. Now, standing in the cool office of the ancient building Junipero Serra had constructed for the betterment of the natives in the area, I wondered ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
741:Ben felt paralyzed with shock. But she hadn't finished. In fact, she'd barely started. She went on to give him a scorching lecture about how he was a victim of this ridiculous, upside-down consumer culture in which everyone was constantly being bombarded with the pernicious promise of happiness, and even worse, being told at every turn that they had the goddamn right to be happy. And if they weren't, they could be, if they just got themselves a new car or a new dishwasher or a new outfit or a new lover. The messages were everywhere, Sally said, in every magazine you picked up. on every dumb TV show, feeling greed and envy, making people dissatisfied with what they had, persuading them they could change it and be happy and successful and beautiful, if only they had some gorgeous new thing or a new girlfriend or a new face or a new pair of silicone tits.... ~ Nicholas Evans, #NFDB
742:Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response then-president Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.” After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists,” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward. When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions. ~ Seth Stephens Davidowitz, #NFDB
743:If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. ~ Viktor E Frankl,#NFDB
744:the old general’6 would visit them at Sparrow Hills. He did his work with great seriousness and devotion; he arrived, walked along the ranks of the convicts, who surrounded him, stopped before each one, asked each about his needs, hardly ever gave anyone a lecture, called them all ‘dear friends’. He gave money, sent necessary items – foot-bindings, foot-rags, linen, sometimes brought edifying books and distributed them to each man who could read, in the full conviction that they would be read en route and that those who could read would read them aloud to those who could not. About crime he rarely asked any questions, though he would listen if a criminal began to talk. All the criminals were on an equal footing as far as he was concerned, there were no distinctions. He talked to them like brothers, but towards the end they began to view him as a father. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
745:I’m pregnant,” she whispered. Sam didn’t miss a beat. “So you’re sitting here trying to get in your cups. Excellent way to manage the stress, Taylor.” Taylor started shaking her head back and forth, a pendulum of distress. “Noo, that’s not it at all. I’m...” “You’re at a complete loss. You’re not ready to have a baby. You haven’t told Baldwin because you don’t know how he’s going to react. You don’t know what to think, how to behave, what to do. That about sum it up?” Taylor gave her a dirty look. “Well, leprosy cases are on the rise, too. Besides, you’re supposed to be encouraging me here. Not—” “Not what? What do you want me to do? You’re a big girl. You can make decisions for yourself. Did you want me to toss the beer over the railing and lecture you? I’ll do it if you want. But I don’t think that’s why you wanted to talk to me. So get drunk and talk.” Taylor ~ J T Ellison, #NFDB
746:I had an uneventful few days," it told her. "The most exciting thing was an hour-long lecture from the headmaster on taking our studies seriously. He said next year's exam will arrive sooner than we think."
"No, they won't," Valkyrie said, frowning. "They'll arrive next year, exactly when we expect them."
"That's what I told him," the reflection nodded. "I don't think he's comfortable with logic, because he didn't look happy. He sent me to the Career Guidance counsellor, who asked me what I wanted to do after college."
Valkyrie stowed her black clothes. "What did you say?"
"I told her I wanted to be a Career Guidance counsellor. She started crying, then accused me of mocking her. I told her if she wasn't happy in her job then she should look at other options, then pointed out that I was already doing her job better than she was. She gave me detention. ~ Derek Landy,#NFDB
747:I was young at Myna, that first time. When had the change come? He had retreated to here, to Collegium, to spin his awkward webs of intrigue and to lecture at the College. Then, years on, the call had come for action. He had gone to that chest in which he stored his youth and found that, like some armour long unworn, it had rusted away.
He tried to tell himself that this was not like the grumbling of any other man who finds the prime of his life behind him. I need my youth and strength now, as never before. A shame that one could no husband time until one needed it. All his thoughts rang hollow. He was past his best and that was the thorn that would not be plucked from his side. He was no different from any tradesman or scholar who, during a life of indolence, pauses partway up the stairs to think, This was not so hard, yesterday. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky,#NFDB
748:I guess there was always some ‘’me’’ inside that small and, later, somewhat bigger shell around which ‘’everything’’ was happening. Inside that shell the entity which one calls ‘’I’’ never changed and never stopped watching what was going on outside. I am not saying to hint at pearls inside. What I am saying is that the passage of time does not much affect that entity. To get a low grade, to operate a milling machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or to lecture on Callimachus in a classroom is essentially the same. This is what makes one feel astonished when one grows up and finds oneself tackling the tasks that are supposed to be handled by grownups. The dissatisfaction of a child with his parents control over him and the panic of an adult confronting a responsibility are of the same nature. One is neither of these figures ; one is perhaps less than ‘’one’’. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
749:I wonder if you've ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
750:Jim Brown
While I was handling Dom Pedro
I got at the thing that divides the race between men who are
For singing "Turkey in the straw" or "There is a fountain filled with blood" -(Like Rile Potter used to sing it over at Concord);
For cards, or for Rev. Peet's lecture on the holy land;
For skipping the light fantastic, or passing the plate;
For Pinafore, or a Sunday school cantata;
For men, or for money;
For the people or against them.
This was it:
Rev. Peet and the Social Purity Club,
Headed by Ben Pantier's wife,
Went to the Village trustees,
And asked them to make me take Dom Pedro
From the barn of Wash McNeely, there at the edge of town,
To a barn outside of the corporation,
On the ground that it corrupted public morals.
Well, Ben Pantier and Fiddler Jones saved the day -They thought it a slam on colts.
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
751:Because the end of a friendship isn’t even formally acknowledged—no Little Talk, no papers served—you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It’s a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn’t even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can’t tell people, “My friend broke up with me,” without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt—“You look like you just lost your best friend”—is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who’d treat you this way isn’t a very good friend and doesn’t deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they’ve ditched you is that you suck. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
752:Long ago, an eminent professor of philosophy interrupted a lecture on Descartes to relate this story to the class: “A friend I hadn’t seen for years told me, ‘Do you know what your most obvious personal trait is? It’s this.’ ” The trait itself remained a secret; we had to guess. The professor continued: “I couldn’t believe it. It seemed absurd. Absolutely absurd. When I got home that day I told my wife, ‘Can you believe what my friend described as my most obvious personal trait? This!’ And my wife said, ‘But of course.’ ” Seeing things that are too close instead of too distant to make out clearly is one definition of philosophy and the philosophical method. “How hard I find it,” writes Wittgenstein, “to see what is right in front of my eyes!”14 Authorities agree: we do not know ourselves. So it is no surprise, after all, that we do not know the spectrum that describes our own minds. ~ David Gelernter, #NFDB
753:I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question “So what is the difference between robust and antifragile?” or the more unenlightened and even more irritating “Antifragile is resilient, no?” The reaction to my answer is usually “Ah,” with the look “Why didn’t you say that before?” (of course I had said that before). Even the initial referee of the scientific article I wrote on defining and detecting antifragility entirely missed the point, conflating antifragility and robustness—and that was the scientist who pored over my definitions. It is worth re-explaining the following: the robust or resilient is neither harmed nor helped by volatility and disorder, while the antifragile benefits from them. But it takes some effort for the concept to sink in. A lot of things people call robust or resilient are just robust or resilient, the other half are antifragile. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
754:Plus tu te plonges dans la lecture d'un livre, plus ton plaisir augmente, plus ta nature s'affine, plus ta langue se délie, plus ton doigté se perfectionne, plus ton vocabulaire s'enrichit, plus ton âme est gagné par l'enthousiasme et le ravissement, plus ton cœur est comblé, plus tu es assuré de la considération des masses cultivées et de l'amitié des princes.
Le livre t'obéit de jour comme de nuit; il t'obéit aussi bien durant tes voyages que pendant les périodes où tu es sédentaire. Il n'est pas gagné par le besoin de dormir; les fatigues de la veille ne l'indisposent pas. Si tu tombes en disgrâce, le livre ne renonce pas pour autant à te servir; si des vents contraires soufflent contre toi, le livre, lui, ne se retourne pas contre toi. Tant que tu es attaché à lui par le fil le plus ténu, que tu es suspendu à lui par le lien le plus imperceptible, alors tu peux te passer de tout le reste ~ Al Jahiz,#NFDB
755:Anwen uncrossed her arms, adjusted her skirt. She glanced from me to Watson. "If it's not an imposition," she said. "You can come too, Jamie. If you want."
At that, I pinched his leg.
"No!" he yelped. "No, go on. I, ah. Have a lecture."
"Are you sure?" I ask him, sniffling.
"I'm sure," he said, and reached out, very gently, to brush away a tear from my face. His dark eyes softened. He really was a better actor than I gave him credit for. "I'll see you later, pumpkin."
As I led Anwen out to the street, I texted from my bag:
Watson?
Yes, pumpkin?
New condition: you cease and desist all gourd-related nicknames.
Done. But pinch me again, and I'll start calling you pickle.
Do that, and I will find and them publish your diaries in a website with a vociferous comments section. Thought I was not a gourd, I was most definitely not a vinegar-soaked phallic object. ~ Brittany Cavallaro,#NFDB
756:On The Platform
When Dr. Bill Bartlett stepped out of the hum
Of Mammon's distracting and wearisome strife
To stand and deliver a lecture on 'Some
Conditions of Intellectual Life,'
I cursed the offender who gave him the hall
To lecture on any conditions at all!
But he rose with a fire divine in his eye,
Haranguing with endless abundance of breath,
Till I slept; and I dreamed of a gibbet reared high,
And Dr. Bill Bartlett was dressing for death.
And I thought in my dream: 'These conditions, no doubt,
Are bad for the life he was talking about.'
So I cried (pray remember this all was a dream):
'Get off of the platform!-it isn't the kind!'
But he fell through the trap, with a jerk at the beam,
And wiggled his toes to unburden his mind.
And, O, so bewitching the thoughts he advanced,
That I clung to his ankles, attentive, entranced!
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
757:Nothing remains, under God, but those passions which have often proved the best ministers of His vengeance, and the surest protectors of the world. ~ Lecture XXVIL: On Habit - Part II, in “Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy”, delivered at The Royal Institution in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806 by the late Rev. Sydney Smith, M.A. (Spottiswoodes and Shaw (London: 1849)), p. 424 ~ Another Variant: When the usual hopes and the common aids of man are all gone, nothing remains under God but those passions which have often proved the best ministers of His purpose and the surest protectors of the world. ~ Quoted by Theodore Roosevelt in his "Brotherhood and the Heroic Virtues" Address at the Veterans' Reunion, Burlington, Vermont, September 5, 1901 and published in Theodore Roosevelt's "The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses" by Dover Publications (April 23, 2009) in its Dover Thrift Editions (ISBN: 978-0486472294), p. 127, #NFDB
758:One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
759:Just before I left for Long Island and my new life, I got another call, this one from Dr. Ernest Sachs, up at Dartmouth Medical School. He was head of neurology at the time, and he invited me up to give a lecture. I was thrilled. I was to play the role of professor at my old alma mater! It was especially sweet because the very same medical school had rejected my application eleven years earlier, even though I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and my brother was one of their stellar graduates. It is events like this in one’s past that fall off the story line. What if I had been accepted and gone? There would have been no split-brain work for me. How would that whole story have been different? I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life’s events. Yet randomness is ever present. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
760:Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,#NFDB
761:Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy-or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: "Joy!" "Awakening," and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their particular brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like "Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back." It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
762:The Only Day In Existence
The early sun is so pale and shadowy,
I could be looking up at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
looking down at me in bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But the morning light is only the first line
in the play of this day-the only day in existence-the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
the thin bedroom curtains
as the beginning of a lecture
I will listen to until it is dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling.
~ Billy Collins,#NFDB
763:Hurrying forward, he opened the door a crack to see Little Willy lumbering down the stairs. The man was a giant. His fists were nearly as large as his head, which was admittedly small for his body. Radcliffe supposed he should be grateful that those fists had only squeezed his behind. Had the man hit him with one of them, he probably would have killed him with the first blow.
Radcliffe sighed at his own thoughts. Dresses, he decided, were hard on a man’s ego. They affected his confidence poorly. Any other time he would have thought the man was large but slow on his feet and that he could easily have outwitted him. In the dress, all he could think was that he would trip himself up with his own skirts and be lucky to survive. He had to find Charlie, get her out of there, and get the damn thing off. Then he would lecture his wife soundly on never ever getting herself in such a dangerous predicament again…for all the good that would do. ~ Lynsay Sands,#NFDB
764:was a little embarrassed after I dressed and sat down to review my schoolwork. She had a large tumbler of imported sherry and poured me a small glass. The Jerez sherry was an indulgence she had learned during the two years she had lived in Barcelona and Ibiza. She pushed the schoolwork aside and started to talk, more a slangish monologue than a lecture: “I certainly don’t believe that story about you screwing a pheasant-hunter but that’s your business, and right now it should matter to no one except you. You’re going to have a hard time, because you are lovely and your body is as fine as I’ve seen.” I objected to this as ugly and irrelevant but she went on: “You have to study extremely hard and find some subject or profession you’re obsessed with because in our culture it has been very hard on the attractive women I know. They are leered at, teased, abused, set on a pedestal, and no one takes them seriously, so you have to use all your energies to develop ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
765:Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode. But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. ~ Richard K Morgan, #NFDB
766:Rose," Alberta said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything."
"You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say."
The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up."
"Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness."
"The reasons don't matter. You shouldn't have left. You shouldn't have dropped out. Your education and training are too valuable—no matter how much you think you know—and you are too talented to risk throwing away your future."
I almost laughed. "To tell you the truth? I'm not sure what my future is anymore."
"Which is why you need to graduate."
"But I dropped out."
She snorted. "Then drop back in!"
"I—what? How?"
"With paperwork. Just like everything else in the world. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
767:You're all Helen talks about. She's been reading Welsh history books and plaguing the family with accounts of Owain Glynd and something called the Eistedfodd." His eyes sparkled with friendly mockery. "Helen was hacking and spitting so much the other day that we thought she was coming down with a cold, until we realized she was practicing the Welsh alphabet."
Ordinarily Rhys would have made some sarcastic retort, but he'd barely noticed the gibe. His chest had gone tight with pleasure.
"She doesn't have to do that," he muttered.
"Helen wants to please you," Devon said. "It's her nature. Which leads to something I want to make clear: Helen is like a younger sister to me. And although I'm obviously the last man alive who should lecture anyone about propriety, I expect you to behave like an altar boy with her for the next few days."
Rhys gave him a surly glance. "I *was* an altar boy, and I can tell you that reports of their virtue are highly exaggerated. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
768:You can tell me all about the new job and lecture me about my lack of focus once I’m done with this mission and giving you this sweater in person. But you’d better meet me somewhere civilized and comfortable, because I’m done with impossible environments.” The comm goes still, and she feels a small ping of guilt for ignoring him. Most ships can’t even handle communications at this range, but the Resistance does have some wonderful toys. Vi puts her boots up and leans back in her seat, focusing on the unwieldy wooden knitting needles that look more like primitive weapons than elegant tools. “It’s all about forward momentum, Gigi,” she says to her astromech, U5-GG. “Better a hideous sweater infused with love than…I don’t know. What other gifts do people give their only living relative? A nice chrono? I shall continue to the end, if imperfectly.” She spins in her chair and holds up what she’s accomplished so far. “What do you think?” Gigi beeps and boops in what sounds ~ Delilah S Dawson, #NFDB
769:Kell had told his brother about the deals he struck in Grey London, and in White, and even on occasion in Red, about the various things he’d smuggled, and Rhy had stared at him, and listened, and when he spoke, it wasn’t to lecture Kell on all the ways it was wrong, or illegal. It was to ask why.
“I don’t know,” said Kell, and it had been the truth.
Rhy had sat up, eyes bleary from drink. “Have we not provided?” he’d asked, visibly upset. “Is there anything you want for?”
“No,” Kell had answered, and that had been a truth and a lie at the same time.
“Are you not loved?” whispered Rhy. “Are you not welcomed as family?”
“But I’m not family, Rhy,” Kell had said. “I’m not truly a Maresh, for all that the king and queen have offered me that name. I feel more like a possession than a prince.”
At that, Rhy had punched him in the face.
For a week after, Kell had two black eyes instead of one, and he’d never spoken like that again, but the damage was done. ~ Victoria Schwab,#NFDB
770:Don't worry about hurting me, Jordan." She brushed back her hair again as she turned from him and headed for the bedroom. "It was too late for that a long time ago."
...
"I've heard the lecture," she informed him as she glared back at him. "I've heard you tell your men how love is an illusion, and how they need to watch their backs before that illusion bites him on the ass, so many times it sickens me. Unless you have something original to add to it, then I don't want to hear it again, if you don't mind."
...
"You're fooling yourself." He had to force the words past his lips. "You're letting lust and pleasure betray you. Tehya. It tricks you. When it fades, all you have left is either friendship or enmity. It's the enmity that worries me, the knowledge of all the little ways you can destroy one another with the knowledge you've gained. I don't want us to go that route. I don't want you to hate me."
...
"Who ruined you before I ever had a chance at your heart? ~ Lora Leigh,#NFDB
771:The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim! ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
772:In that same lecture, Kahneman confessed that the outsize power of the remembering self mystified him. “Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight we put on experiences?” he asked the audience. “This is a bit hard to justify, I think.” But perhaps the answer is obvious: children. The remembering self ensures that we’ll keep having them. More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman’s study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales. ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
773:It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher). ~ James Shapiro, #NFDB
774:All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the world, and then back out. Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering. By the same token, the most profound human suffering becomes a mere pedagogical tool. Anatomy professors are perhaps the extreme end of this relationship, yet their kinship to the cadavers remains. Early on, when I made a long, quick cut through my donor’s diaphragm in order to ease finding the splenic artery, our proctor was both livid and horrified. Not because I had destroyed an important structure or misunderstood a key concept or ruined a future dissection but because I had seemed so cavalier about it. The look on his face, his inability to vocalize his sadness, taught me more about medicine than any lecture I would ever attend. ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
775:BLACK WINGS At the same Olympics, staged by Hitler to consecrate the superiority of his race, the star that shone brightest was black, a grandson of slaves, born in Alabama. Hitler had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill, four of them actually: the four gold medals that Jesse Owens won in sprinting and long jump. The entire world celebrated those victories of democracy over racism. When the champion returned home, he received no congratulations from the president, nor was he invited to the White House. He returned to the usual: he boarded buses by the back door, ate in restaurants for Negroes, used bathrooms for Negroes, stayed in hotels for Negroes. For years, he earned a living running for money. Before the start of baseball games he would entertain the crowd by racing against horses, dogs, cars, or motorcycles. Later on, when his legs were no longer what they had been, Owens took to the lecture circuit. He did pretty well there, praising the virtues of religion, family, and country. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
776:I bump into a group of girls congregating around a locker. Jessica, Willow (who is notably the only Willow enrolled in our 397-student class and in our 1,579-student school), and Abby. Miney has labeled them in my notebook, in block letters and underlined with a Sharpie:THE POPULAR BITCHES.
When she first used this designation, Miney had to give me a long lecture about how this wasn’t an oxymoron, how someone could be both popular, which I presumed meant that lots of people liked you, and at the same time also be a bitch, which I presumed would have the opposite outcome. Apparently popularity in the context of high school has a negative correlation with people actually liking you but a high correlation with people wanting to be your friend. After careful consideration, this makes sense, though in my case, I am both an outlier and a great example of the fact that correlation does not imply causation. I am nice to everyone but without any upside: People neither like me nor want to be my friend. ~ Julie Buxbaum,#NFDB
777:Pretty soon after returning from Everest, I was asked to give a lecture on the Everest expedition to my local sailing club in the Isle of Wight.
It would be the first of many lectures that I would eventually give, and would soon become my main source of income after returning from the mountain.
Those early talks were pretty ropey, though, by anyone’s standards.
That first one went okay, mainly due to the heavy number of family members in the audience. Dad cried, Mum cried, Lara cried. Everyone was proud and happy.
The next talk was to a group of soldiers on a course with the SAS. I took one of my old buddies along with me for moral support.
Huge Mackenzie-Smith always jokes to this day how, by the time I finished, the entire room had fallen asleep. (They had been up all night on an exercise, I hasten to add--but still--it wasn’t my finest hour.)
We had to wake them--one by one.
I had a lot to learn about communicating a story if I was to earn any sort of a living by giving talks. ~ Bear Grylls,#NFDB
778:Do not think of him with Blay. Do not think of him with Blay. Do not think of him—
“I didn’t know you were a sherry man.”
“Huh?" Qhuinn glanced down at what he’d poured himself. Fuck. In the midst of the self-lecture, he’d picked up the wrong bottle. “Oh, you know… I’m good with it.”
To prove the point, he tossed back the hooch—and nearly choked as the sweetness hit his throat.
He served himself another only so he didn’t look like the kind of idiot who wouldn’t know what he was dishing out into his own glass.
Okay, gag. The second was worse than the first.
From out of the corner of his eye, he watched Saxton settle in at the table, the brass lamp in front of him casting the most perfect glow over his face. Shiiiiiit, he looked like something out of a Ralph Lauren ad, with his buff-colored tweed jacket and his pointed pocket square and that button-down/sweater vest combo keeping his fucking liver cozy.
Meanwhile, Qhuinn was sporting hospital scrubs, bare feet. And sherry. ~ J R Ward,#NFDB
779:We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the 'wisecrack'. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be 'got up' as if it were a 'subject'. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, 'pinned down'. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
780:I'll tell you something banal.We're emotional illiterates.And not only you and I-practically everybody,that's the depressing thing.We're taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it's called,but not a word about the soul.We're abysmally ignorant,about both ourselves and others.There's a lot of loose talk nowadays to the effect that children should be brought up to know all about brotherhood and understanding and coexistence and equality and everything else that's all the rage just now.But it doesn't dawn on anyone that we must first learn something about ourselves and our own feelings.Our own fear and loneliness and anger.We're left without a chance,ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions.To make a child aware of it's soul is something almost indecent.You're regarded as a dirty old man.How can you understand other people if you don't know anything about yourself?Now you're yawning,so that's the end of the lecture. ~ Ingmar Bergman, #NFDB
781:Nevertheless, the idea is deeply embedded in American Protestantism that the clergy go to seminary in order to become theologians. I recall, for example, giving a lecture at a seminary a while ago in which I made a remark which particularly agitated the Dean of the seminary, and he said to me, 'No responsible theologian would say what you just said!' That seemed to me reassuring news. A few days later I received a letter from someone who had been present at this exchange. The letter declared that the Dean had been mistaken and that in fact Soren Kierkegaard had written in his journals somewhere the substance of what I had said. I reported this comforting and distinguished citation to the Dean, who without hesitation announced: 'Oh, Kierkegaard is not a responsible theologian.' How could he be? He was no seminary professor. How could he know much about the mystery of God's presence in the world? Kierkegaard, after all, was only in the world - where God is - not in the seminary - where the theologians are! ~ William Stringfellow, #NFDB
782:I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passo est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
783:In Roosevelt’s view, the international system was in constant flux. Ambition, self-interest, and war were not simply the products of foolish misconceptions of which Americans could disabuse traditional rulers; they were a natural human condition that required purposeful American engagement in international affairs. International society was like a frontier settlement without an effective police force: In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. This essentially Hobbesian analysis delivered in, of all occasions, a Nobel Peace Prize lecture, marked America’s departure from the proposition that neutrality and pacific intent were adequate to serve the peace. For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them. ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
784:Frankly, as an oyster’s.’ ‘Really, my dear Charlotte,’ I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Göhren. Why had I not stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I were an oyster—curious how much the word disconcerted me—at least I was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes, nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was dark; so I got up, ~ Elizabeth von Arnim, #NFDB
785:He remained seated on his revolving stool, turned toward us, hands between his knees, in a position the same as ours, and with a few words concluded his lecture on the question of why Beethoven had not written a third movement to Opus 111. We had needed only to hear the piece, he said, to be able to answer the question ourselves. A third movement? A new beginning, after that farewell? A return — after that parting? Impossible! What had happened was that the sonata had found its ending in its second, enormous movement, had ended never to return. And when he said, “the sonata,” he did not mean just this one, in C minor, but he meant the sonata per se, as a genre, as a traditional artform — it had been brought to an end, to its end, had fulfilled its destiny, reached a goal beyond which it could not go; canceling and resolving itself, it had taken its farewell - the wave of goodbye from the D-G-G motif, consoled melodically by the C-sharp, was a farewell in that sense, too, a farewell as grand as the work, a farewell from the sonata. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
786:Vincent, why do you waste your mind and soul in all these struggles and disputes? Their outcome does not matter, really. But one thing matters, and that is the love of God.” The mad innocent sincerity of these words all but wiped away Vincento’s suspicions and could provoke him to nothing stronger than a smile. “It seems you have taken the trouble to learn something of my affairs. But, reverend Brother, what do you really understand of my disputes and why I have them?” The friar drew back with a little quiver of distaste. “I do not understand them. I do not wish to; it is not my way.” “Then, Brother, pardon me, but it seems to me you should not lecture on what you do not understand, nor stand here disputing with me as to why I have disputes.” The friar accepted the rebuke so meekly that Vincento felt a momentary pang of something like regret for having spoken it. And with that the dispute between them, if one could really call it that, was over, Vincento having scored his point with the ease of an armored knight knocking down a child. ~ Fred Saberhagen, #NFDB
787:It is the perennial problem of the teacher to be able to judge where the student currently is in his or her understanding and lead them onwards from there. This is why a living 'guru' is really needed, so that questions may be asked and answered face to face.
When we read a book, or even listen to a tape recording of a lecture or dialogue, we are receiving only a particular viewpoint, aimed at a student of a particular level. It may resonate or it may not. Even the method of expression is crucial. Whilst one person may appreciate logic and intellectual analysis, another may need sympathetic reassurance and practical guidance.
(...)
Ultimately, the truth is one and everything else that might be said is only at the level of appearance, using a language that is necessarily objective and dualistic. What is needed is a teacher whose words and style 'click' with our particular mental conditioning. This book aims to present excerpts from traditional and modern teaching in a wide variety of styles, in the hope that something will click. ~ Dennis Waite,#NFDB
788:We must encourage [each other] once we have grasped the basic points to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grown. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting no more and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind. ~ Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures., #NFDB
789:You weren't always so...appreciative. When I said that men enjoyed my company, you said you found that hard to believe."
What?" he retorted with a scowl. "I never said any such thing."
"Yes, you did, the day that I asked you to investigate my suitors. I remember it clearly."
"Theres no way in hell I ever..." The conversation came back to him suddenly, and he shook his head. "You're remembering only part, sweeting. You said that men enjoyed your company and considered you easy to talk to. It was the last part I found hard to believe."
"Oh." She eyed him askance. "Why? You never seem to have trouble talking to me. Or rather, lecturing me."
"It's either lecture you or stop up your mouth with kisses," he said dryly. "Talking to you isn't easy, because every time I'm near you I burn to carry you off to some secluded spot and do any number of wicked things to you."
She blinked, then gazed at him with such softness that it made his chest hurt. "Then why don't you?"
-Celia and Jackson ~ Sabrina Jeffries,#NFDB
790:One icy winter morning he called for me at a hotel in a Midwestern city to take me about thirty-five miles to another town to fill a lecture engagement. We got into his car and started off at a rather high rate of speed on the slippery road. He was going a little faster than I thought reasonable, and I reminded him that we had plenty of time and suggested that we take it easy. “Don’t let my driving worry you,” he replied. “I used to be filled with all kinds of insecurities myself, but I got over them. I was afraid of everything. I feared an automobile trip or an airplane flight; and if any of my family went away I worried until they returned. I always went around with a feeling that something was going to happen, and it made my life miserable. I was saturated with inferiority and lacked confidence. This state of mind reflected itself in my business and I wasn’t doing very well. But I hit upon a wonderful plan which knocked all these insecurity feelings out of my mind, and now I live with a feeling of confidence, not only in myself but in life generally. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
791:The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless this universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are of the form of the human body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them and put them in a servicable condition. ~ Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (1921) Lecture I, Space and Time in Pre-Relativity Physics, #NFDB
792:If you start reading some book, even a very easy one, or listen to the clearest lecture in the world, with excessive attention, and an exaggerated concentration of mind, not only does the easy become difficult for you, not are you amazed and surprised and grieved at an unexpected difficulty, not do you strive harder to understand than you would have with less attention, not only do you understand less, but, if your attention and the fear of not understanding or of not letting something escape is really extreme, you will understand absolutely nothing, as if you hadn't read, and hadn't listened, and as if your were completely intent on another matter. For from to much comes nothing, and to much attention to a thing is the equivalent, in effect, of not paying attention, and of having another, completely different occupation, that is, attention itself. Nor will you be to gain your purpose unless you relax, and slow down your mind, placing it in a natural state, and soothe and put aside your concern to understand, which only in that case will be useful. ~ Giacomo Leopardi, #NFDB
793:It was very instructive: Manchineel, apparently, had been used by the Aboriginal Peoples of the Caribbean for poison, torture, and several other worthwhile purposes. Even sitting under the tree during a rainstorm could be deadly. In fact, the Carib Indians had actually tied their prisoners to the trunk of the tree when it rained, because the water dripping off the leaves made an acid bath strong enough to eat through human flesh. And arrows dipped in the sap could cause painful death; clearly it was wonderful stuff. But Frank’s main point—avoid the manchineel!—was very plain long before he wound up his lecture with a few halfhearted warnings about poison oak. And then, just when I thought we could make our getaway, one of the boys said, “What about snakes?” Frank smiled happily; on to lethal animals! He took a deep breath, and he was off again. “Oh, it’s not just snakes,” he said. “I mean, we talked about the rattlesnakes—diamondback and pygmy—and coral snakes! They are Absolute Killers! Don’t confuse them with the corn snake— Remember? ‘Red touches yellow’?” He ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
794:Wall Street and corporate American know there is no deal considered beneath the Clintons. If they will, as reported, wheel and deal off the human tragedy of the Haitian disaster, then they will indeed do anything. If they are willing to defame and destroy women abused by Bill Clinton, they will not only do that, but proclaim themselves feminists. They have created a huge shakedown conglomerate in the Clinton Foundation in Machiavellian fashion: the philanthropy brilliantly masks the cynical tapping of such funds for personal aggrandizement. Quid pro quos go through the foundation to “help” the helpless while providing the family the moral veneer to moonlight and rake in huge fees from foundation donors, who do not give such largess for nothing. Hitting up corporate finaglers for $70 million in tag-along private jet travel would be burdensome; but creating a tax-free “philanthropy” to provide such corporate one-percent travel for the three Clintons (whether to lecture on global warming or the unfair tax policies of the one-percent) is brilliant in the Medieval sense. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
795:told his students in “The World Since 1914” class that there was little point in discussing the Third World when they knew so little about how their own society works: “So I told them about the USA — really very hair-raising when it is all laid out in sequence: . . . . 1. cosmic hierarchy; 2. energy; 3. agriculture; 4. food; 5. health and medical services; 6. education; 7. income flows and the worship of GROWTH; 8. inflation. . . showing how we are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we. . . have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world.” 7 He feared “that the students will come to feel that all is hopeless, so I must. . . show them how solutions can be found by holistic methods seeking diversity, de-centralization, communities. . .etc.” 8 Pleased with the class response, he later recalled: “The students were very excited and my last lecture in which I put the whole picture together was about the best lecture I ever gave. That was 10 Dec. [1975], my last full day of teaching after 41 years. ~ Carroll Quigley, #NFDB
796:...the ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion. Thus it is necessary to make a decisive choice. Whether, under such conditions, science is a worth while 'vocation' for somebody, and whether science itself has an objectively valuable 'vocation' are again value judgments about which nothing can be said in the lecture-room. To affirm the value of science is a presupposition for teaching there. I personally by my very work answer in the affirmative, and I also do so from precisely the standpoint that hates intellectualism as the worst devil, as youth does today, or usually only fancies it does. In that case the word holds for these youths: 'Mind you, the devil is old; grow old to understand him.' This does not mean age in the sense of the birth certificate. It means that if one wishes to settle with this devil, one must not take flight before him as so many like to do nowadays. First of all, one has to see the devil's ways to the end in order to realize his power and his limitations. ~ Max Weber, #NFDB
797:Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not. It’s really hard for a child to see things from the teacher’s point of view, because the child has never been a teacher. Piaget and Kohlberg both thought that parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development. If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
798:Herodis Attikos
What glory, this, for Herodis Attikos!
Alexander of Selefkia, one of our better sophists,
on reaching Athens to lecture
finds the city deserted
because Herodis was in the country and all the young men
had followed him there to hear him.
This makes sophist Alexander
write Herodis a letter
begging him to send the Greeks back.
And the tactful Herodis answers at once:
'Along with the Greeks, I'm coming too.'
How many young men now in Alexandria,
in Antioch or Beirut
(being trained by Hellenism as its future orators),
meeting at choice banquets
where the talk is sometimes about fine sophistry,
sometimes about their exquisite love affairs,
suddenly find their attention wandering and fall silent?
Their glasses untouched,
they think about Herodis' fortunewhat other sophist has been given this kind of honour?
Whatever his wish, whatever he does,
the Greeks (the Greeks!) follow him,
not to criticize or debate,
not even to choose any longer,
only to follow.
~ Constantine P. Cavafy,#NFDB
799:How much for a picture with the girl?” one of the men called, nodding at Lily. Another man whistled and others chortled. Oren stiffened. He tipped up his derby, and his eyebrows narrowed into a scowl. “I’ve got two rules here today, boys.” Lily stifled a smile. She’d heard Oren’s lecture plenty of times. She could only imagine what he’d say if he found out about Jimmy Neil’s attack of the night before. He’d never let her go anywhere by herself again. Oren pulled his corncob pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at the men. “One—you keep your filthy hands off Lily, and I’ll keep my hands off your puny chicken necks.” Except for the rhythmic ring of hammer on anvil coming from the crudely built log cabin that served as a shop for the camp blacksmith, silence descended over the clearing. “Two,” Oren continued, “you keep your shifty eyes off Lily, and I’ll keep from blowing a hole through your pea-brain heads.” With that, he toed the rifle, which he always laid on the ground in front of the tripod. She saw no need to tell them Oren had never shot anyone, at least not yet. ~ Jody Hedlund, #NFDB
800:Another Plan
Editor Owen, of San Jose,
Commonly known as 'our friend J.J.'
Weary of scribbling for daily bread,
Weary of writing what nobody read,
Slept one day at his desk and dreamed
That an angel before him stood and beamed
With compassionate eyes upon him there.
Editor Owen is not so fair
In feature, expression, form or limb
But glances like that are familiar to him;
And so, to arrive by the shortest route
At his visitor's will he said, simply: 'Toot.'
'Editor Owen,' the angel said,
'Scribble no more for your daily bread.
Your intellect staggers and falls and bleeds,
Weary of writing what nobody reads.
Eschew now the quill-in the coming years
Homilize man through his idle ears.
Go lecture!' 'Just what I intended to do,'
Said Owen. The angel looked pained and flew.
Editor Owen, of San Jose,
Commonly known as 'our friend J.J.'
Scribbling no more to supply his needs,
Weary of writing what nobody reads,
Passes of life each golden year
Speaking what nobody comes to hear.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
801:Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional ‘free market’ and the much-advertised horrors of ‘socialism’? Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste. We have been here before. In 1905, the young William Beveridge—whose 1942 report would lay the foundations of the British welfare state—delivered a lecture at Oxford, asking why political philosophy had been obscured in public debates by classical economics. Beveridge’s question applies with equal force today. However, this eclipse of political thought bears no relation to the writings of the great classical economists themselves. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
802:By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club. Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as “J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium; a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause. Julius ~ Kai Bird, #NFDB
803:Et c’est là, en effet, un des grands et merveilleux caractères des beaux livres (et qui nous fera comprendre le rôle à la fois essentiel et limité que la lecture peut jouer dans notre vie spirituelle) que pour l’auteur ils pourraient s’appeler « Conclusions » et pour le lecteur « Incitations ». Nous sentons très bien que notre sagesse commence où celle de l’auteur finit, et nous voudrions qu’il nous donnât des réponses, quand tout ce qu’il peut faire est de nous donner des désirs. Et ces désirs, il ne peut les éveiller en nous qu’en nous faisant contempler la beauté suprême à laquelle le dernier effort de son art lui a permis d’atteindre. Mais par une loi singulière et d’ailleurs providentielle de l’optique des esprits (loi qui signifie peut-être que nous ne pouvons recevoir la vérité de personne, et que nous devons la créer nous-même), ce qui est le terme de leur sagesse ne nous apparaît que comme le commencement de la nôtre, de sorte que c’est au moment où ils nous ont dit tout ce qu’ils pouvaient nous dire qu’ils font naître en nous le sentiment qu’ils ne nous ont encore rien dit. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
804:People reject the cross because it contradicts historical values and expectations—just as Peter challenged Jesus for saying, “The Son of Man must suffer”: “Far be it from You; this shall not happen to You.” But Jesus rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31, 33). “In the course of a few moments,” Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation. Suffering and death were not supposed to happen to the Messiah. He was expected to triumph over evil and not be defeated by it. How could God’s revelation be found connected with the “the worst of deaths,” the “vilest death,” “a criminal’s death on the tree of shame”?[15] Like the lynching tree in America, the cross in the time of Jesus was the most “barbaric form of execution of the utmost cruelty,” the absolute opposite of human value systems. It turned reason upside down. In his sermon-lecture “The Transvaluation of Values” in Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr turns to Paul to express what it meant to see the world from a transcendent, divine point of view. ~ James H Cone, #NFDB
805:The halls had long since expelled the energetic swarm of youthful humanity, and the din of lockers and laughter had long since settled into stillness. It was his least favorite time of the day. He could lose himself in their conversations, lurk behind them as they ran, as they danced, as they embraced one another. He could sit in on many a lecture, solve the most challenging equations, recite the first chapter of a Tale of Two Cities word for word, and as long as life filled the halls, he could pretend he lived among them. But when they were gone he was utterly and completely alone. Alone as he had been day after day, year after year, decade after decade. There was a time he had descended into madness - but time had brought him out again. What good is being crazy if there is no one who can deem you insane? Or for that matter - care whether you are normal? Insanity was exhausting and futile. So was pain. For a time, the despair was so great that he begged for oblivion. But time had taken even that from him. Now he simply wished to feel anything at all. And so he continued on, waiting for redemption. ~ Amy Harmon, #NFDB
806:WHEN: Sometime in the 1930s WHERE: The office of the Gosplan, the central planning authority of the USSR WHAT: Interview for the post of the chief statistician The first candidate is asked by the interview board, ‘What is two plus two, comrade?’ He answers: ‘Five.’ The chairman of the interview board smiles indulgently and says: ‘Comrade, we very much appreciate your revolutionary enthusiasm, but this job needs someone who can count.’ The candidate is politely shown the door. The second candidate’s answer is ‘Three.’ The youngest member of the interview board springs up and shouts: ‘Arrest that man! We cannot tolerate this kind of counter-revolutionary propaganda, under-reporting our achievements!’ The second candidate is summarily dragged out of the room by the guards. When asked the same question, the third candidate answers: ‘Of course it is four.’ The professorial-looking member of the board gives him a stern lecture on the limitations of bourgeois science, fixated on formal logic. The candidate hangs his head in shame and walks out of the room. The fourth candidate is hired. What was his answer? ‘How many do you want it to be? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
807:The Igbo people of Southern Nigeria are more than ten million strong and must be accounted one of the major peoples of Africa. Conventional practice would call them a tribe, but I no longer follow that convention. I call them a nation.
"Here we go again!," you might be thinking.
Well, let me explain. My Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines tribe as follows: "group of (esp. primitive) families or communities linked by social, religious or blood ties and usually having a common culture and dialect and a recognized leader." If we apply the different criteria of this definition to Igbo people we will come up with the following results:
a. Igbo people are not primitive; if we were I would not be offering this distinguished lecture, or would I?;
b. Igbo people are not linked by blood ties; although they may share many cultural traits;
c. Igbo people do not speak one dialect; they speak one language which has scores of major and minor dialects;
d. and as for having one recognized leader, Igbo people would regard the absence of such a recognized leader as the very defining principle of their social and political identity. ~ Chinua Achebe,#NFDB
808:Okay, here are the top ten reasons why I can't stand my sister Lucy:
10. I get all her hand-me-downs, even her bras.
9. Whem I refuse to wear her hand-me-downs, especially her bras, I get the big lecture about waste and the environment. Look, I am way concerned about the environment. But that does not mean I want to wear me sister's old bras.I told Mom I see no reason why I should even have to wear a bra, seeing as how it's not like I've got a lot to put in one, causing Lucy to remark that if I don't wear a bra now, then if I ever do get anything up there. it will be all saggy like those tribal women we saw on the Discovery Channel.
8. This is another reason why I can't stand Lucy. Because she is always making these kind of remarks. What we should really do, if you ask me, is send Lucy's old bras to those tribal women.
7. Her conversations on the phone go like this: "No way... So what did he say?... Then what did she say?... No way... That is so totally untrue... I do not. I so do not... Who said that?... Well, it isn't true... No. I do not... I do not like him... Well, okay, maybe I do. Oh, gotta go, call-waiting. ~ Meg Cabot,#NFDB
809:In the face of this difficulty [of defining "computer science"] many people, including myself at times, feel that we should ignore the discussion and get on with doing it. But as George Forsythe points out so well in a recent article*, it does matter what people in Washington D.C. think computer science is. According to him, they tend to feel that it is a part of applied mathematics and therefore turn to the mathematicians for advice in the granting of funds. And it is not greatly different elsewhere; in both industry and the universities you can often still see traces of where computing first started, whether in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or even business. Evidently the picture which people have of a subject can significantly affect its subsequent development. Therefore, although we cannot hope to settle the question definitively, we need frequently to examine and to air our views on what our subject is and should become. ~ Richard Hamming, 1968 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 16 (1), January 1969, p. 4. In this quote Hamming refers to George Forsythe, "What to do until the computer scientist comes", Am. Math. Monthly 75 (5), May 1968, p. 454-461., #NFDB
810:This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
811:I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elder, mullein and pokeweed. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
812:Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God. ~ Tim Powers, #NFDB
813:So there are long conversations in cafés about Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau, and all the boys that we were just beginning to get excited about in London when the first French literature filtered across after the Liberation. My God, Leo, there is some very interesting stuff being written in France at present on the philosophical and literary front. I begin to get some glimmering too about ‘existentialism’ the latest philosophy of France – Sartre, out of Husserl, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Last week I had a very great experience. Jean-Paul Sartre came to Brussels to give a lecture on existentialism, and I met him after the lecture, and on the following day during an interminable café séance. He is small, squints appallingly, is very simple and charming in manner and extremely attractive. What versatility! Philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism! No wonder the stuffy professional philosophers are suspicious. I don’t make much yet of his phenomenology, but his theories on morals, which derive from Kierkegaard, seem to me first rate and just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Prichard. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
814:When there’s a knock at my door, I scream, “Go away!”
The knock gets more persistent.
“Fuckin’ leave me alone!”
As the door creaks open, I hurl a cup at the door. The cup doesn’t hit a hospital employee; it hits Mrs. P. squarely in the chest.
“Oh, shit. Not you,” I say.
Mrs. P.’s got new glasses, with rhinestones on them. “That’s not exactly the greeting I expected, Alex,” she says. “I can still give you a detention for cussing, you know.”
I turn on my side so I don’t have to look at her. “Did you come here to give me detention slips? ’Cause if you did, you can forget it. I’m not goin’ back to school. Thanks for visitin’. Sorry you have to leave so soon.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you hear me out.”
Oh, please no. Anything except having to listen to her lecture. I push the button that calls the nurse.
“Can we help you, Alex?” a voice bellows through the speaker.
“I’m bein’ tortured.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Mrs. P. walks over to me and pulls the speaker out of my hand. “He’s joking. Sorry to bother you.” She puts the remote speaker on the nightstand, deliberately out of my reach. “Don’t they give you happy pills in this place?”
“I don’t want to be happy. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
815:We get a lot of goormies in Libby’s,” said Mr. Murchison. “I can spot a goormy right off. Moment he sits down he wants to know do we have any boolybooze.” “Bouillabaisse,” said Mr. Flood. “Yes,” said Mr. Murchison, “and I tell him, ‘Quit showing off! We don’t carry no boolybooze. Never did. There’s a time and a place for everything. If you was to go into a restaurant in France,’ I ask him, ‘would you call for some Daniel Webster fish chowder?’ I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy. All they know is boolybooze and pompano and something that’s out of season, nothing else will do. And when they get through eating they don’t settle their check and go on about their business. No, they sit there and deliver you a lecture on what they et, how good it was, how it was almost as good as a piece of fish they had in the Caffy dee lah Pooty-doo in Paris, France, on January 16, 1928; they remember every meal they ever et, or make out they do. And every goormy I ever saw is an expert on herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs! If you let one get started on the subject of herbs he’ll talk you deef, dumb, and blind. Way I feel about herbs, on any fish I ever saw, pepper and salt and a spoon of melted butter is herbs aplenty. ~ Joseph Mitchell, #NFDB
816:Emma laughed, and replied: "But I had the assistance of all your endeavours to counteract the indulgence of other people. I doubt whether my own sense would have corrected me without it."
"Do you?—I have no doubt. Nature gave you understanding:—Miss Taylor gave you principles. You must have done well. My interference was quite as likely to do harm as good. It was very natural for you to say, what right has he to lecture me?—and I am afraid very natural for you to feel that it was done in a disagreeable manner. I do not believe I did you any good. The good was all to myself, by making you an object of the tenderest affection to me. I could not think about you so much without doating on you, faults and all; and by dint of fancying so many errors, have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least. [...] "How often, when you were a girl, have you said to me, with one of your saucy looks—'Mr. Knightley, I am going to do so-and-so; papa says I may, or I have Miss Taylor's leave'—something which, you knew, I did not approve. In such cases my interference was giving you two bad feelings instead of one."
"What an amiable creature I was!—No wonder you should hold my speeches in such affectionate remembrance. ~ Jane Austen,#NFDB
817:himself. Out in the hallway, waiting for the john, Muriel asked Tommy Molto what he thought. Molto picked with a fingernail at spots of tomato sauce on his shirt and tie, and said he didn’t know what to think. Muriel wasn’t sure either. When they returned, Anne-Marie had slid her chair beside Collins’s and was holding his free hand. The other was still gripping his Bible. After a minute or two of fiddling with the tape recorders to be sure they were running, Muriel gave the date and time, then asked Collins what happened when they left Paradise. “I followed Erno back to his house, and sat with him in his car. He’d been through some changes that night. We both had. At Paradise, he’d been outta-his-mind angry, then all blown away and subdued. Now he was just flat-out scared, trying to think out every angle not to get caught. He had one lecture after another for me. Make sure and mention to some folks how him and me went out for a pop last night. Don’t ever get myself inebriated and start braggin about all this to my homes or some lady I was after. The big thing on his mind, though, was how to get rid of that apron full of stuff in his trunk — the gun, the wallets, the jewelry, it was all in there. It was past three by now ~ Scott Turow, #NFDB
818:Les anonymes (R.J. Ellory) - Votre surlignement sur la page 431 | emplacement 6599-6607 | Ajouté le dimanche 11 janvier 2015 00:12:06 Opération Granit. Opération Beffroi. Des balises secrètement installées dans des endroits perdus entre la Colombie et le Panamá pour aider les pilotes de la CIA qui convoient la drogue à voler de l’Amérique au Panamá presque au niveau de la mer sans être détectés par les avions de la répression antidrogue américaine. Destination : l’aéroport militaire d’Albrook, au Panamá. Opération Rachat, impliquant la société-écran de la CIA, la Pacific Seafood Company. La drogue est entreposée dans des bateaux transportant des crevettes et expédiée en divers points des États-Unis. C’est une opération conjointe de la CIA et de la DEA. Opérations Petite Piste, Route de Birmanie, Or matinal, Retour de bâton, Ciel indigo et Triangle. Informations fournies par les agents de la CIA et du renseignement de la Marine suivants : Trenton Parker, Gunther Russbacher, Michael Maholy et Robert Hunt. Lecture recommandée : le travail fondateur de Rodney Stich intitulé Décontaminer l’Amérique. Profit estimé des opérations de la CIA autour de la contrebande de marijuana et de cocaïne : entre 10 et 15 milliards de dollars. ========== ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
819:I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any
science may do much more by that than by any direct apologetic work…. We can
make people often attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but
the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they
are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted….
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by
Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most
easily if you look at it the other way around. Our faith is not very likely to be
shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book
on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were
Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of
Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic
assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on
Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he
wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the
market was always by a Christian. ~ C S Lewis,#NFDB
820:Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
821:Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
822:Truthfulness includes the small things that no one but you would ever know about. ... I also realized that I could not lecture on truthfulness and clarity and at the same time lie about my income (or anything else). It is in the nitty-gritty details of your life that you live your yoga.
... I told her that if I used one I would be sending our children a message: It is okay to break the law (or lie) as long as you don't get caught. To do this, I would not be modeling integrity, so I reluctantly declined to purchase a radar detector. ... [I]f I want to live a truthful life, that choice of truthfulness must be part of the decisions that are worth a penny as well as those that are worth a million dollars. ... the results of becoming fully entrenched in the truth: You cannot say anything that does not come true. In other words, if you are living the truth, then you cannot lie-because you are the truth. Everything you say comes true because you and the truth are one. Learning to speak from your place of truth is one of the most difficult - and one of the most important - things you can do in life. It is worth it because it frees you from the separation that lying creates, and it simultaneously supports others in living and speaking their truths. ~ Judith Hanson Lasater,#NFDB
823:What height is this table?' he said suddenly, just as I was about to go to the bread bin for a slice to wipe my plate with. I turned round and looked at him, wondering why he was bothering with such an easy question.
'Thirty inches,' I told him, and took a crust from the bin.
'Wrong,' he said with an eager grin. 'Two foot six.'
I shook my head at him, scowling, and wiped the brown rim of soup from the inside of my plate. There was a time when I was genuinely afraid of these idiotic questions, but now, apart from the fact that I must know the height, length, breadth, area and volume of just about every part of the house and everything in it, I can see my father's obsession for what it is. It gets embarrassing at times when there are guests in the house, even if they are family and ought to know what to expect. They'll be sitting there, probably in the lounge, wondering whether Father's going to feed them anything or just give an impromptu lecture on cancer of the colon or tapeworms, when he'll sidle up to somebody, look round to make sure everybody's watching, then in a conspiratorial stage-whisper say: 'See that door over there? It's eighty-five inches, corner to corner. ' Then he'll wink and walk off, or slide over on his seat, looking nonchalant. ~ Iain Banks,#NFDB
824:En ce temps-là, le musée Guimet était un temple. C’est ainsi qu’il se dresse, maintenant, au fond de ma mémoire.
Je vois un large escalier de pierre s’élevant entre des murs couverts de fresques. Tout en gravissant les degrés, l’on rencontre successivement un brahmine altier versant une offrande dans le feu sacré ; des moines bouddhistes vêtus de toges jaunes s’en allant quêter, bol en main, leur nourriture quotidienne ; un temple japonais posé sur un promontoire auquel conduit, par-delà un torii rouge, une allée bordée de cerisiers en fleur. D’autres figures, d’autres paysages de l’Asie sollicitent encore l’attention du pèlerin montant vers le mystère de l’Orient [...].
A droite, est une toute petite salle de lecture où les fervents de l’orientalisme s’absorbent en de studieuses recherches, oublieux de Paris dont les bruits heurtent en vain les murs du musée-temple, sans parvenir à troubler l’atmosphère de quiétude et de rêve qu’ils enclosent.
Dans cette petite chambre, des appels muets s’échappent des pages que l’on feuillette. L’Inde, la Chine, le Japon, tous les points de ce monde qui commence au-delà de Suez sollicitent les lecteurs... Des vocations naissent... la mienne y est née.
Tel était le musée Guimet quand j’avais vingt ans". ~ Alexandra David N el,#NFDB
825:For about five minutes, as I tried to get the Vespa to start, I fell in love with her. The oversized raincoat made her look about eight, as though she should have had matching Wellies with ladybugs on them, and inside the red hood were huge brown eyes and rain-spiked lashes and a face like a kitten’s. I wanted to dry her gently with a big fluffy towel, in front of a roaring fire. But then she said, “Here, let me—you have to know how to twist the thingy,” and I raised an eyebrow and said, “The thingy? Honestly, girls.” I immediately regretted it—I have never been talented at banter, and you never know, she could have been some earnest droning feminist extremist who would lecture me in the rain about Amelia Earhart. But Cassie gave me a deliberate, sideways look, and then clasped her hands with a wet spat and said in a breathy Marilyn voice, “Ohhh, I’ve always dreamed of a knight in shining armor coming along and rescuing little me! Only in my dreams he was good-looking.” What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely. I looked at her hoodie jacket and said, “Oh my God, they’re about to kill Kenny.” Then I loaded the Golf Cart into the back of my Land Rover and drove her home. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
826:Time Spent In Dress
In many a lecture, many a book,
You all have heard, you all have read,
That time is precious. Of its use
Much has been written, much been said.
The accomplishments which gladden life,
As music, drawing, dancing, are
Encroachers on our precious time;
Their praise or dispraise I forbear.
They should be practised or forborne,
As parents wish, or friends desire:
What rests alone in their own will
Is all I of the young require.
There's not a more productive source
Of waste of time to the young mind
Than dress; as it regards our hours
My view of it is now confined.
Without some calculation, youth
May live to age and never guess,
That no one study they pursue
Takes half the time they give to dress.
Write in your memorandum-book
The time you at your toilette spend;
Then every moment which you pass,
Talking of dress with a young friend:
And ever when your silent thoughts
Have on this subject been intent,
Set down as nearly as you can
195
How long on dress your thoughts were bent.
If faithfully you should perform
This task, 'twould teach you to repair
Lost hours, by giving unto dress
Not more of time than its due share.
~ Charles Lamb,#NFDB
827:The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong.
The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. 'If I am the wisest man,' said Socrates, 'it is because I alone know that I know nothing.' The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
Alas, none of this was new to me. (There is very little that is new to me; I wish my correspondents would realize this.) This particular theme was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating me. He also told me that all theories are proven wrong in time.
My answer to him was, 'John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
828:You can't tell me you haven't been lifting,” Bailey said. “I can tell. You may have a naturally good physique, but you're shredded. You've got serious size and you're hardened down.”
This coming from a kid who'd never lifted a weight in his life, Ambrose thought, shaking his head and pushing another tray of cupcakes into the oven. Yeah, cupcakes.
“So what's the point? I mean, you've got this amazing body–big, strong. You just going to keep it to yourself? You gotta share it with the world, man.”
“If I didn't know better, I would think you were hitting on me,” Ambrose said.
“Do you stand naked in front of the mirror and flex every night? I mean, really, at least go into the adult film industry. At least it won't go completely to waste.”
“There you go again . . . talking about things you know nothing about,” Ambrose said. “Fern reads romance novels and you are suddenly Hugh Hefner. I don't think either of you has room to lecture me about anything.”
“Fern's been lecturing?” Bailey sounded surprised and not at all offended that Ambrose had basically told him he didn't know jack crap because he was in a wheelchair.
“Fern's been leaving inspirational quotes,” Ambrose said.
“Ahhh. That sounds more like Fern. Like what? Just Believe? Dream big? Marry me? ~ Amy Harmon,#NFDB
829:by have a home in the first place? Good question! When I have a tea party for my grandchildren, I'm passing on to them the things my mama passed on to me-the value of manners and the joy of spending quiet time together. When Bob reads a Bible story to those little ones, he's passing along his deep faith. When we watch videos together, play games, work on projects-we're building a chain of memories for the future. These aren't lessons that can be taught in lecture form. They're taught through the way we live. What we teach our children-or any child who shares our lives-they will teach to their children. What we share with our children, they will share with generations to come.
friend of mine loves the water, the out doors, and the California sunshine. She says they're a constant reminder of God's incredible creativity. Do you may have a patio or a deck or a small balcony? Bob and I have never regretted the time and expense of creating outdoor areas to spend time in. And when we sit outside, we enhance our experience with a cool salad of homegrown tomatoes and lettuce, a tall glass of lemonade, and beautiful
flowers in a basket. Use this wonderful time to contemplate all God is doing in your life.
ecome an answer to prayer!
• Call and encourage someone today. ~ Emilie Barnes,#NFDB
830:The tricky thing about living in a society that allows you freedom is that everyone else has it too. Some people can’t handle that. They can’t accept their neighbor making a different choice than they did. That’s the tricky part, letting someone else have the freedom to choose. A choice isn’t really a choice if there is only one option. It’s inherent with real choices—with true freedom—that everyone can make their own decisions. For us to be free, we have to come to terms with that. We have to understand that not every decision is ours to make. Not every decision is a good one. People call me a hero. They say that because I fought for them. Let me tell you, that was the easy part. The hard part, the part that really mattered, is what happened after. That’s what I want to be remembered for. Not because I fought. Not because I killed. Not because I survived. Remember me because I tolerated. Remember me because I accepted. Remember me because I understood that I’m not here to make your choices. If I had done that, if I had been just one more dictator sitting atop a golden throne, then it would have been for nothing. I didn’t free you from your oppressive rulers. I freed you from yourselves. I’m sorry if you don’t like it. Unattributed lecture series notes 37 A.W. City University ~ A C Cobble, #NFDB
831:I’m surprised at you,” Mada said.
Cass lowered her head. Had she been foolish to think Mada might understand? “I figured you would be.”
Mada squeezed her hand. “No, silly. I’m surprised you let yourself fall for Falco in the first place.” She looked at Cass with wide, affectionate eyes. “It’s scary to give part of yourself to someone else. I know what it’s like to be terrified of pain. Of loss.”
“What do you mean?” Cass was startled; she was sure her friend was going to lecture her for her indiscretion.
“When my mother died, my father nearly went insane with grief.” Madalena toyed with the golden crucifix hanging from her belt. “And even though I was only ten years old, I couldn’t imagine ever letting myself love someone like that. Setting myself up for all that pain.”
“But Marco--” Cass started.
“I didn’t love him from the beginning,” Mada said. “He was kind and handsome, but I still found reasons not to like him. His hands were rough. He sometimes smelled of ship parts--of tallow and burning coal.” She shrugged. “But as you can see, he won me over.”
Cass bunched up her eyebrows. “So you’re saying I’ll grow to love Luca?”
Mada grinned. “I would. Did you see the muscles on that man? Toting all those heavy legal tomes around must be working in his favor. ~ Fiona Paul,#NFDB
832:The tricky thing about living in a society that allows you freedom is that everyone else has it too. Some people can’t handle that. They can’t accept their neighbor making a different choice than they did. That’s the tricky part, letting someone else have the freedom to choose. A choice isn’t really a choice if there is only one option. It’s inherent with real choices—with true freedom—that everyone can make their own decisions. For us to be free, we have to come to terms with that. We have to understand that not every decision is ours to make. Not every decision is a good one. People call me a hero. They say that because I fought for them. Let me tell you, that was the easy part. The hard part, the part that really mattered, is what happened after. That’s what I want to be remembered for. Not because I fought. Not because I killed. Not because I survived. Remember me because I tolerated. Remember me because I accepted. Remember me because I understood that I’m not here to make your choices. If I had done that, if I had been just one more dictator sitting atop a golden throne, then it would have been for nothing. I didn’t free you from your oppressive rulers. I freed you from yourselves. I’m sorry if you don’t like it.
Unattributed lecture series notes 37 A.W. City University ~ A C Cobble,#NFDB
833:The tricky thing about living in a society that allows you freedom is that everyone else has it too. Some people can’t handle that. They can’t accept their neighbor making a different choice than they did. That’s the tricky part, letting someone else have the freedom to choose. A choice isn’t really a choice if there is only one option. It’s inherent with real choices—with true freedom—that everyone can make their own decisions. For us to be free, we have to come to terms with that. We have to understand that not every decision is ours to make. Not every decision is a good one. People call me a hero. They say that because I fought for them. Let me tell you, the fighting was the easy part. The hard part, the part that really mattered, is what happened after. That’s what I want to be remembered for. Not because I fought. Not because I killed. Not because I survived. Remember me because I tolerated. Remember me because I accepted. Remember me because I understood that I’m not here to make your choices. If I had done that, if I had been just one more dictator sitting atop a golden throne, then it would have been for nothing. I didn’t free you from your oppressive rulers. I freed you from yourselves. I’m sorry if you don’t like it. Unattributed lecture series notes 37 A.W. City University ~ A C Cobble, #NFDB
834:Among the objections to the reality of objects of sense, there is one which is derived from the apparent difference between matter as it appears in physics and things as they appear in sensation. Men of science, for the most part, are willing to condemn immediate data as "merely subjective," while yet maintaining the truth of the physics inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though it may be *capable* of justification, obviously stands in need of it; and the only justification possible must be one which exhibits matter as a logical construction from sense-data―unless, indeed, there were some wholly *a priori* principle by which unknown entities could be inferred from such as are known. It is therefore necessary to find some way of bridging the gulf between the world of physics and the world of sense, and it is this problem which will occupy us in the present lecture. Physicists appear to be unconscious of the gulf, while psychologists, who are conscious of it, have not the mathematical knowledge required for spanning it. The problem is difficult, and I do not know its solution in detail. All that I can hope to do is to make the problem felt, and to indicate the kind of methods by which a solution is to be sought."
―from Our Knowledge of the External World , p. 107. ~ Bertrand Russell,#NFDB
835:A little murmur of admiration greeted this neat reply and on the crest of it the hostess rose to dismiss the meeting. The ladies rustled forward towards the lecturer but he, deprecating their flattery, came to greet Helena. "I was told your Majesty might do me the honor of coming."
"I scarcely hoped you had recognized me. I am afraid the lecture was far above my head. But I am delighted to see you have prospered. Are you . . . are you able to travel as you wish?"
"Yes, I was given my freedom many years ago by a kind, foolish old woman who took a fancy for my verses."
"Did you get to Alexandria?"
"Not yet, but I found what I wanted. Did you reach Troy, Highness?"
"No, oh no."
"Or Rome?"
"Not even there."
"But you found what you wanted?"
"I have accepted what I found. Is that the same?"
"For most people. I think you wanted more."
"Once. Now I am past my youth."
"But your question just now. 'When? Where? How do you know?'--was a child's question."
"That is why your religion would never do for me, Marcias. If I ever found a teacher it would have to be one who called little children to him."
"That, alas, is not the spirit of the time. We live in a very old world today. We know too much. We should have to forget everything and be born again to answer your question. ~ Evelyn Waugh,#NFDB
836:Les pays les plus prospères ont réussi à accumuler des pouvoirs de destruction tels que d'anéantir, cent fois, non seulement tous les êtres humains qui ont existé à ce jour, mais aussi la totalité de tous les êtres vivants qui ont jamais dessiné souffle sur cette planète du malheur.
Un jour comme aujourd'hui, mon maître William Faulkner dit: «Je refuse d'accepter la fin de l'homme." Je tomberais indigne de se tenir dans ce lieu qui était le sien, si je devais pas pleinement conscients que la tragédie colossale qu'il a refusé de reconnaître, il y a trente-deux ans est maintenant, pour la première fois depuis le début de l'humanité, rien de plus qu'un simple possibilité scientifique. Face à cette réalité impressionnante qui a dû sembler une simple utopie à travers tout le temps humain, nous, les inventeurs de contes, qui croire quoi que ce soit, se sentent en droit de croire qu'il n'y a pas encore trop tard pour participer à la création de l'utopie opposée . Une nouvelle et radicale utopie de la vie, où personne ne sera en mesure de décider pour les autres comment ils meurent, où l'amour se révélera vrai bonheur et être possible, et où les races condamnées à cent ans de solitude aura enfin et pour toujours , une deuxième chance sur la terre."
― Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel lecture (8 Décembre 1982) ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,#NFDB
837:Immigration
Now Jordan's land of promise is the burden of my song.
Perhaps you've heard him lecture, and blow about it strong;
To hear him talk you'd think it was a heaven upon earth,
But listen and I'll tell you now the plain unvarnished truth.
Here mutton, beef, and damper are all you'll get to eat,
From Monday morn till Sunday night, all through the blessed week.
And should the flour bag run short, then mutton, beef, and tea
Will be your lot, and whether or not, 'twill have to do, you'll see.
Here snakes and all vile reptiles crawl around you as you walk,
But these you never hear about in Mr. Jordan's talk;
Mosquitoes, too, and sandflies, they will tease you all the night,
And until you get quite colonised you'll be a pretty sight.
Here are boundless plains where it seldom rains, and you'll maybe die of thirst;
But should you so dispose your bones, you'll scarcely be the first,
For there's many a strong and stalwart man come out to make his pile,
Who never leaves the fatal shore of this thrice accursed isle.
To sum it up in few short words, the place is only fit
For those who were sent out here, for from this they cannot flit.
But any other men who come a living here to try,
Will vegetate a little while and then lie down and die.
~ Banjo Paterson,#NFDB
838:One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—-ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this.
Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The reader should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.
The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,#NFDB
839:❝ Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of ‘yes’ and 'no,’ which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative. Logicians draw circles that overlap or exclude each other, and all their rules immediately become clear. Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being. Thus profound metaphysics is rooted in an implitcit geometry which– whether we will or no–confers spatiality upon thought; if a metaphysician could not draw, what would he think? Open and closed, for him, are thoughts. They are metaphors that he attaches to everything, even his systems. In a lecture given by Jean Hyppolite on the subtle structure of denegation (which is quite different from the simple structure of negation) Hyppolite spoke of “a first myth of outside and inside.” And he added: “you feel the full significance of this myth of outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these two term. Beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two.” And so, simple geometrical opposition becomes tinged with agressivity. Formal opposition is incapable of remaining calm. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
840:Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy. ~ Salman Khan, #NFDB
841:First up, Blackwell [1972] did a set of experiments on fifty-seven college students to determine the effect of colour—as well as the number of tablets—on the effects elicited. The subjects were sitting through a boring hour-long lecture, and were given either one or two pills, which were either pink or blue. They were told that they could expect to receive either a stimulant or a sedative. Since these were psychologists, and this was back when you could do whatever you wanted to your subjects—even lie to them—the treatment that all the students received consisted simply of sugar pills, but of different colours. Afterwards, when they measured alertness—as well as any subjective effects—the researchers found that two pills were more effective than one, as we might have expected (and two pills were better at eliciting side-effects too). They also found that colour had an effect on outcome: the pink sugar tablets were better at maintaining concentration than the blue ones. Since colours in themselves have no intrinsic pharmacological properties, the difference in effect could only be due to the cultural meanings of pink and blue: pink is alerting, blue is cool. Another study suggested that Oxazepam, a drug similar to Valium (which was once unsuccessfully prescribed by our GP for me as a hyperactive child) was more effective at treating anxiety in a green tablet, and more effective for depression when yellow. Drug ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB
842:It is something that can be attained only through despair, through tragedy, through long, painful, and ceaseless struggle. It is not irrational, sentimental, emotional, or spontaneous. It comes as the result of serious thinking and learning, of rigid discipline, of complete sobriety, absolute will. It is something few can attain; but all can—and should—search for it. This is as far as I can go. If you want to go further, if you want to know about the nature of religious experience, about the way to it, about faith itself, you have to read Kierkegaard. Even so, you may say that I have tried to lead you further than I know the road myself. You may reproach me for trying to make Kierkegaard accept society as real and meaningful whereas he actually repudiated it. You may even say that I have failed in relating faith to existence in society. All these complaints would be justified, but I would not be very much disturbed by them—at least not as far as the purpose of this talk is concerned. For all I wanted to show you is the possibility that we have a philosophy that enables men to die. Do not underestimate the strength of such a philosophy. For in a time of great sorrow and catastrophe such as we have to live through, it is a great thing to be able to die. But it is not enough. Kierkegaard too enables men to die; but his faith also enables them to live. From a lecture delivered at Bennington College, where Drucker had joined the faculty in 1942. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
843:This, after all, is the literal level on which the incident took place. She asked him to hit her and when he said he didn’t want to, she wanted to stop having sex. So why, despite its factual accuracy, does this feel like a dishonest way of narrating what happened? What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colours, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.
What’s left for them, then? There doesn’t seem to be a halfway position anymore. Too much has passed between them for that. So it’s over, and they’re just nothing? What would it even mean, to be nothing to her? He could avoid her, but as soon as he saw her again, even if they only glanced at one another outside a lecture hall, the glance could not contain nothing. He could never really want it to. He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her. ~ Sally Rooney,#NFDB
844:Sitting through a classroom lecture is painful for most people most of the time. We all know this, yet so many deny it or view it as a personal failing. When human beings are required to sit and listen, we squirm. We watch the clock tick slowly. Minutes can seem like hours. We escape into our own head. We invent activities to either occupy or numb ourselves. The most talented classroom sitters create micro-tasks to busy their hands and the other 80 percent of their minds. The pain is cumulative. The first hour of lecture in a day is bearable. The second is hard. The third is white-hot excruciating. The highly engaging presenter who periodically arises in the classroom does little to soften the physiological impact of the subsequent dull one. This reality goes beyond a power thing, or even an interest thing, or a quality of the teacher thing. Even when corporate leaders and heads of state attend highly relevant daylong events at which they listen to the highest-tier speakers, they are suppressing their own body ticks 90 minutes into the lecture. The lunch break becomes an oasis. Students are psychologically ravished daily by this onslaught. And it is costly on all involved—teachers, administrators, parents, siblings. Although this recommendation subverts most industrial business and logistics models, 2 non-adjacent hours of lecture a day should be the greatest number for any institution or program. And the most successful will have even less than that. This requires an alternative approach. ~ Clark Aldrich, #NFDB
845:Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her head politely, as if the TV were a foreign dignitary giving an unintelligible lecture, and waiting for any news from Dr. Gautman. As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies In Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl--they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances--anyhow, these pink chameleons, voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall. "Oh, but we DID want to dance!" the actresses cry at the end of the scene, their faces changing almost totally. All these angry multiplying women.
Hopes were like these ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. Our mom had become agitated as the movie credits rolled: There had never been a chance for them! What STUPID women. That day we watched TV with her until the hospital began to empty, until the lights went white as a screech and the room grew so quiet... ~ Karen Russell,#NFDB
846:Sermons We See
I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day;
I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
The eye's a better pupil and more willing than the ear,
Fine counsel is confusing, but example's always clear;
And the best of all the preachers are the men who live their creeds,
For to see good put in action is what everybody needs.
I soon can learn to do it if you'll let me see it done;
I can watch your hands in action, but your tongue too fast may run.
And the lecture you deliver may be very wise and true,
But I'd rather get my lessons by observing what you do;
For I might misunderstand you and the high advise you give,
But there's no misunderstanding how you act and how you live.
When I see a deed of kindness, I am eager to be kind.
When a weaker brother stumbles and a strong man stays behind
Just to see if he can help him, then the wish grows strong in me
To become as big and thoughtful as I know that friend to be.
And all travelers can witness that the best of guides today
Is not the one who tells them, but the one who shows the way.
One good man teaches many, men believe what they behold;
One deed of kindness noticed is worth forty that are told.
Who stands with men of honor learns to hold his honor dear,
For right living speaks a language which to every one is clear.
Though an able speaker charms me with his eloquence, I say,
I'd rather see a sermon than to hear one, any day.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
847:You do realize she has a boyfriend. And she’s rich. And white. And wears designer clothes you’ll never be able to afford.”
Yeah, I know that. And I’m sick and tired of being reminded of it. “I need your help, Isa. Not a lecture. I’ve got Paco givin’ me his crap already.”
Isa holds up her hands. “I’m just pointing out facts. You’re a smart guy, Alex. Add it up. No matter how much you might want her in your life, she doesn’t belong. A triangle can’t fit into a square. Now I’ll shut up.”
“Gracias.” I don’t point out that if it’s a big enough square, a small triangle can fit inside perfectly. All you have to do is make a few adjustments in the equation. I’m too drunk and high to explain it now.
“I’m parked across the street,” Isa says. She lets out a big, frustrated sigh. “Follow me.”
I follow Isabel to her car, hoping we can walk in silence. No such luck.
“I was in class with her last year, too,” Isa says.
“Uh-huh.”
She shrugs. “Nice girl. Wears too much makeup.”
“Most chicks hate her.”
“Most chicks wish they looked like her. And they wish they had her money and boyfriend.”
I stop and regard her in disgust. “Burro Face?”
“Oh, please, Alex. Colin Adams is cute, he’s the captain of the football team and Fairfield’s hero. You’re like Danny Zuko in Grease. You smoke, you’re in a gang, and you’ve dated the hottest bad girls around. Brittany is like Sandy…a Sandy who’ll never show up to school in a black leather jacket with a ciggie hangin’ from her mouth. Give up the fantasy. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
848:I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another [with sight and hearing]. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, and tragedies should be living tangible interpreters of the real world. The lecture halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom... But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of common day." Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college. The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures – solitude, books and imagination – outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
849:Sara was silent, all of her exuberance at being with Perry fading. She had come here to be with him, not to receive a lecture from his mother, no matter how well-intentioned. Why was Perry allowing it without a word? He was being complacent while his mother dominated their time together. Ignoring a twinge of resentment, Sara tried to steer the conversation in a new direction. "Tell me what happened in Greenwood Corners while I was away. How is old Mr. Dawson's gout?"
"Much better," Martha replied. "He actually put his shoes on the other day and went for a stroll."
"His niece Rachel became engaged to Johnny Chesterson the day before last," Perry added.
"Oh, that's wonderful," Sara exclaimed. "The Chestersons are lucky to have such a nice girl in their family."
Martha nodded primly. "Rachel is the kind of spiritual, self-effacing girl that Mr. Kingswood always hoped his son would marry. She would never dream of drawing attention to herself... as some young women do."
"Are you referring to me?" Sara asked quietly.
"I am making a point about Rachel."
Slowly Sara set her cup and saucer on the table and looked at Perry, who had colored at his mother's rudeness. "It's a wonder you never courted such a paragon," Sara told him, smiling although her chest was tightening with anger.
Martha answered for her son. "Perry was never free to court her or any other girls in the village. Someone else was always taking up his time with her demanding possessiveness."
Sara felt her face turn red. "Was that you or me, I wonder? ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
850:I'm profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. Largely because Seymour himself literally begged me to do so, and I never knew him to be wrong in these matters.) Happily for me, and probably for everybody, I don't believe it's really necessary to bring Zen into this. The method of marble-shooting that Seymour, by sheer intuition, was recommending to me can be related, I'd say, legitimately and un-Easternly, to the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket from across a room. An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
851:Lying in bed that night, as we stared up at the ceiling, I said, “Did you know that people who have sex more often live longer?”
Sleepily, she came back with, “More often than what?”
“More often than other people, I guess.”
“How would they know how much is ‘more’ if the people who don’t have sex are dead?”
“You’re a silly girl but you make a good point. It must have been one hell of a study.”
“Do you think it’s a matter of healthier people having more sex or sex making you healthier?”
“Both, maybe. I just read it somewhere,” I said.
“Is this your way of giving me a lecture on heart health?”
“Are you making a heart joke, Avelina? It’s heart to tell.”
She started laughing hysterically. “That was bad. Even you have to admit that was awful.”
“I have a great sense of humor. I’ve just spent way too many years around science geeks.”
“If I saw you on the street, I would never peg you for a doctor or a science geek.”
“Well, I’m both. What would you guess about me?”
“I don’t know—that you’re an actor or a model.”
“Stop.”
“I’m serious. You have model good looks. What would you think about me if you saw me on the street?”
“Goddess. That’s pretty much what I think when I look at you now.” I turned to face her. There was just enough light coming from the hallway so I could see her expression and her gorgeous full lips turned up into a smile.
“You are charming. Not very funny, but definitely charming.” She leaned in and kissed me, and then moments later we were asleep. ~ Renee Carlino,#NFDB
852:There are some who are still weak in faith, who ought to be instructed, and who would gladly believe as we do. But their ignorance prevents them...we must bear patiently with these people and not use our liberty; since it brings to peril or harm to body or soul...but if we use our liberty unnecessarily, and deliberately cause offense to our neighbor, we drive away the very one who in time would come to our faith. Thus St. Paul circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3) because simple minded Jews had taken offense; he thought: what harm can it do, since they are offended because of ignorance? But when, in Antioch, they insisted that he out and must circumcise Titus (Gal. 2:3) Paul withstood them all and to spite them refused to have Titus circumcised... He did the same when St. Peter...it happened in this way: when Peter was with the Gentiles he ate pork and sausages with them, but when the Jews came in, he abstained from this food and did not eat as he did before. Then the Gentiles who had become Christians though: Alas! we, too, must be like the Jews, eat no pork, and live according to the law of Moses. But when Paul learned that they were acting to the injury of evangelical freedom, he reproved Peter publicly and read him an apostolic lecture, saying: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Gal. 2:14). Thus we, too, should order our lives and use our liberty at the proper time, so that Christian liberty may suffer no injury, and no offense be given to our weak brothers and sisters who are still without the knowledge of this liberty. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
853:Thomas Carlyle, following Plato, pictures a man, a deep pagan thinker, who had grown to maturity in some hidden cave and is brought out suddenly to see the sun rise. “What would his wonder be,” exclaims Carlyle, “his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free, open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight.... This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all.” How different are we who have grown used to it, who have become jaded with a satiety of wonder. “It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty,” says Carlyle, “it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it.... We call that fire of the black thundercloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.” These penetrating, almost prophetic, ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
854:I open the books on Right and on ethics; I listen to the professors and jurists; and, my mind full of their seductive doctrines, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order; I bless the wisdom of our political institutions and, knowing myself a citizen, cease to lament I am a man. Thoroughly instructed as to my duties and my happiness, I close the book, step out of the lecture room, and look around me. I see wretched nations groaning beneath a yoke of iron. I see mankind ground down by a handful of oppressors, I see a famished mob, worn down by sufferings and famine, while the rich drink the blood and tears of their victims at their ease. I see on every side the strong armed with the terrible powers of the Law against the weak.
And all this is done quietly and without resistance. It is the peace of Ulysses and his comrades, imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops and waiting their turn to be devoured. We must groan and be silent. Let us for ever draw a veil over sights so terrible. I lift my eyes and look to the horizon. I see fire and flame, the fields laid waste, the towns put to sack. Monsters! where are you dragging the hapless wretches? I hear a hideous noise. What a tumult and what cries! I draw near; before me lies a scene of murder, ten thousand slaughtered, the dead piled in heaps, the dying trampled under foot by horses, on every side the image of death and the throes of death. And that is the fruit of your peaceful institutions! Indignation and pity rise from the very bottom of my heart. Yes, heartless philosopher! come and read us your book on a field of battle! ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,#NFDB
855:From all the things he has bothered to find out about the way the Ghoshes ran their business - planting lumpens within unions to spark off violence so that all the union workers could be sacked; an old story of buying off a business from a friend's widow, who did not know any better, for a fraction of its real value; using the Hindu-Muslim riots the year before Independence, the year he was born, to shut down mills, regardless of how many workers were deprived of their livelihoods, and buying up factories in areas emptied by the migration - all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. The anecdotes need not be first-hand; in fact, better if they are not, better if they are repeated across several degrees of separation, because that proves how potent and pervasive they are, bringing everyone together in one huge, collusive matrix. A legendary lecture given by so-and-so in Presidency College in 1926, its iconic status relayed by a nineteen-year-old in 1965 with the words "You needed to be there to feel the goosebumps". The memory of a martinet kept alive by stories recounting his disciplinary measures from fifty years ago, handed down a dendritic chain of people across the generations. This is the way this world runs: self-mythologising through anecdotes proliferating like a particularly virulent strain of virus. Chatter chatter chatter, always the chatter of what others did and others said in a golden age of an unrecoverable past. ~ Neel Mukherjee, #NFDB
856:The Butterfly
SISTER.
Do, my dearest brother John,
Let that butterfly alone.
BROTHER.
What harm now do I do?
You're always making such a noiseSISTER.
O fie, John; none but naughty boys
Say such rude words as you.
BROTHER.
Because you're always speaking sharp:
On the same thing you always harp.
A bird one may not catch,
Nor find a nest, nor angle neither,
Nor from the peacock pluck a feather,
But you are on the watch
To moralize and lecture still.
SISTER.
And ever lecture, John, I will,
When such sad things I hear.
But talk not now of what is past;
The moments fly away too fast,
Though endlessly they seem to last
To that poor soul in fear.
BROTHER.
Well, soon (I say) I'll let it loose;
But, sister, you talk like a goose,
There's no soul in a fly.
SISTER.
It has a form and fibres fine,
Were tempered by the hand divine
Who dwells beyond the sky.
Look, brother, you have hurt its wing-
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And plainly by its fluttering
You see it's in distress.
Gay painted coxcomb, spangled beau,
A butterfly is called, you know,
That's always in full dress:
The finest gentleman of all
Insects he is-he gave a ball,
You know the poet wrote.
Let's fancy this the very same,
And then you'll own you've been to blame
To spoil his silken coat.
BROTHER.
Your dancing, spangled, powdered beau,
Look, through the air I've let him go:
And now we're friends again.
As sure as he is in the air,
From this time, Ann, I will take care,
And try to be humane.
~ Charles Lamb,#NFDB
857:Nikolay Anastasyevitch Ananyev, the engineer, was a broad-shouldered, thick-set man, and, judging from his appearance, he had, like Othello, begun the "descent into the vale of years," and was growing rather too stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making women mean when they speak of "a man in the prime of his age," that is, he was neither young nor old, was fond of good fare, good liquor, and praising the past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly when he was asleep, and in his manner with those surrounding him displayed that calm imperturbable good humour which is always acquired by decent people by the time they have reached the grade of a staff officer and begun to grow stout. His hair and beard were far from being grey, but already, with a condescension of which he was unconscious, he addressed young men as "my dear boy" and felt himself entitled to lecture them good-humouredly about their way of thinking. His movements and his voice were calm, smooth, and self-confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road, that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His sunburnt, thicknosed face and muscular neck seemed to say: "I am well fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you young people too, will be wellfed, healthy, and satisfied with yourselves. . . ." He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots. From certain trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was able to guess that he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
858:Mais ils dormaient déjà, en vérité, et tout ce temps ne fut qu'un long sommeil. La ville était peuplée de dormeurs éveillés qui n'échappaient réellement à leur sort que ces rares fois où, dans la nuit, leur blessure apparemment fermée se rouvrait brusquement. Et réveillés en sursaut, ils en tâtaient alors, avec une sorte de distraction, les lèvres irritées, retrouvant en un éclair leur souffrance, soudain rajeunie, et, avec elle, le visage bouleversé de leur amour. Au matin, ils revenaient au fléau, c'est-à-dire à la routine.
Mais de quoi, dira-t-on, ces séparés avaient-ils l'air ? Eh bien, cela est simple, ils n'avaient l'air de rien. Ou, si on préfère, ils avaient l'air de tout le monde, un air tout à fait général. Ils partageaient la placidité, et les agitations puériles de la cité. Ils perdaient les apparences du sens critique, tout en gagnant les apparences du sang-froid. On pouvait voir, par exemple, les plus intelligents d'entre eux faire mine de chercher comme tout le monde dans les journaux, ou bien dans les émissions radiophoniques, des raisons de croire à une fin rapide de la peste, et concevoir apparemment des espoirs chimériques, ou éprouver des craintes sans fondement, à la lecture de considérations qu'un journaliste avait écrites un peu au hasard, en bâillant d'ennui. Pour le reste, ils buvaient leur bière ou soignaient leurs malades, paressaient ou s'épuisaient, classaient des fiches ou faisaient tourner des disques sans se distinguer autrement les uns des autres. Autrement dit, ils ne choisissaient plus rien. La peste avait supprimé les jugements de valeur. Et cela se voyait à la façon dont personne ne s'occupait plus de la qualité des vêtements ou des aliments qu'on achetait. On acceptait tout en bloc. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
859:The Bears waited nervously while the judges studied, measured, and weighed, and then studied, measured, and weighed some more. Finally, they made their announcement: “THE FIRST-PRIZE WINNER--AND STILL CHAMPION…”
Of course, that meant Farmer Ben had won. It was close--it turned out that Ben’s Monster was just a little bigger, rounder, and oranger than Papa’s Giant. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The Giant didn’t even come in second. A beautiful pumpkin grown by Miz McGrizz won second prize. The Giant came in third. Papa and the cubs were crushed…crushed and very quiet as they pushed their third-prize winner home.
It wasn’t until they reached the crest of a hill that overlooked Bear Country that Mama decided to have her say. “I know you’re disappointed. But third prize is nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, Thanksgiving isn’t about contests and prizes. It’s about giving thanks. And it seems to me that we have a lot of be thankful for.”
Perhaps it was Mama’s lecture, or maybe it was how beautiful Bear Country looked in the sunset’s rosy glow. But whatever the reason, Papa and the cubs began to understand what Mama was talking about.
Even more so on Thanksgiving Day. After the Bears gave thanks for the wonderful meal they were about to enjoy, Sister Bear gave her own special thanks. “I’m thankful,” she said, “that we didn’twin first prize: if we had, The Giant would be on display in front of City Hall instead of being part of the yummy pies we’re going to have for dessert!”
As the laughter faded and the Bears thought about the blessings of family, home, friends, and neighbors, they knew deep down in their hearts that there was no question about it--indeed they did have a great deal to be thankful for. ~ Stan Berenstain,#NFDB
860:We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930.
...The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong...
My answer to him was, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that 'right' and 'wrong' are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.
When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
861:Strategic Planning Today: A Six-Step Process The strategic planning process offers incredible benefits if we pursue it correctly. The following six steps constitute one version of the process: mission, objective, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and control. The first step in the process is to define your mission; as we saw at the beginning of this lecture, this is the core that guides you. Your mission is what you look to in setting your objectives. The objectives established in the second step are chosen based on some notion of wanting to fulfill your mission. They should be clear, concise, achievable, and in some sense, measurable. The third step, the environmental scan, is pivotal for most firms, and it is the most involved. Look at both the external and internal environments in which your firm functions. On a personal level, evaluate the external factors that impinge on you with respect to your objectives. The fourth step is the actual formulation of strategy. Decide what you will actually do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Allocate resources and connect your management decisions with the people who will implement the plan. The fifth step is implementation of strategy, and here is where many companies fail because they do not follow the military dictum to “supervise and refine.” This means not to simply issue orders and assume that they’ll be carried out. The sixth step, control, involves developing a control mechanism to evaluate whether or not the plan is working. When the control or monitoring system tells you that something is amiss in your strategy, you can then circle back to your environmental scan to discover whether the relevant environmental factors have changed. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
862:The huge, drafty building echoed with the clanks and thuds and shouts of mock battle. Khesot walked slowly up and back, his mild brown eyes narrowed, considering, as he watched us work.
“Get that shield arm up,” he said to a tough old stonemason. “Remember you will likely be fighting mounted warriors, and I very much fear that most of us will be afoot. The mounted fighter has the advantage; therefore you must unhorse your opponent before you can hope to win…”
We had spent days affixing shiny metal bits to our shields to reflect sunlight at the horses and cause them to rear. We had also practiced slicing saddle belts, hooking spears or swords around legs and heaving warriors out of the saddle. And we learned other methods of unhorsing warriors, such as tying fine-woven twine between two trees at just the right height so that the riders would be knocked off their horses.
Khesot turned around, then frowned at two young men who had assumed the old dueling stance and were slashing away at one another with merry abandon, their swords ringing.
“Charic! Justav! What do you think you are doing?”
The men stopped, Charic looking shamefaced. “Thought we’d refine a little, in case we take on one o’ them aristos--“
“Many of whom are trained in swordplay from the time they begin to walk,” Khesot cut in, his manner still mild; but now both young men had red faces. “By the very best sword masters their wealthy parents can hire. It would take them precisely as long as it amused them to cut you to ribbons. Do not engage their officers in a duel, no matter how stupid you might think them. Two of you, moving as I told you, can knock them off balance…”
He went on to lecture the two, who listened soberly. Several others gathered around to listen as well. ~ Sherwood Smith,#NFDB
863:The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the vast territory of Mexico.” A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston Courier (they were later collected as the Biglow Papers). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, in his own dialect, on the war: Ez fer war, I call it murder,— There you hev it plain an’ flat; I don’t want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that. . . . They may talk o’ Freedom’s airy Tell they’er pupple in the face,— It’s a grand gret cemetary Fer the barthrights of our race; They jest want this Californy So’s to lug new slave-states in To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye, An’ to plunder ye like sin. The war had barely begun, the summer of 1846, when a writer, Henry David Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax, denouncing the Mexican war. He was put in jail and spent one night there. His friends, without his consent, paid his tax, and he was released. Two years later, he gave a lecture, “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was then printed as an essay, “Civil Disobedience”: It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
864:The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the vast territory of Mexico.” A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston Courier (they were later collected as the Biglow Papers). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, in his own dialect, on the war: Ez fer war, I call it murder,— �� There you hev it plain an’ flat; I don’t want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that. . . . They may talk o’ Freedom’s airy Tell they’er pupple in the face,— It’s a grand gret cemetary Fer the barthrights of our race; They jest want this Californy So’s to lug new slave-states in To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye, An’ to plunder ye like sin. The war had barely begun, the summer of 1846, when a writer, Henry David Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax, denouncing the Mexican war. He was put in jail and spent one night there. His friends, without his consent, paid his tax, and he was released. Two years later, he gave a lecture, “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was then printed as an essay, “Civil Disobedience”: It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
865:Dropping The Euphemism
He has five children, I’m papa
to a hundred pencils.
I bought the chair he sat in
from a book of chairs,
staplers and spikes
that let me play Vlad the Impaler
with invading memos. When I said
I have to lay you off
a parallel universe was born
in his face, one where flesh
is a loose shirt
taken to the river and beaten
against rocks. Just
by opening my mouth I destroyed
his faith he’s a man
who can think honey-glazed ham
and act out the thought
with plastic or bills. We sat.
I stared at my hands, he stared
at the wall staring at my hands.
I said other things
about the excellent work he’d done
and the cycles of business
which are like
the roller-coaster thoughts
of an oscilloscope. All this time
I saw the eyes of his wife
which had always been brown
like almonds but were now brown
like the crust of bread. We walked
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to the door, I shook his hand,
felt the bones pretending
to be strong. On his way home
there was a happy song
because de Sade invented radio,
the window was open, he saw
delphinium but couldn’t remember
the name. I can only guess.
Maybe at each exit
that could have led his body
to Tempe, to Mars, he was tempted
to forget his basketball team
of sons, or that he ever liked
helping his wife clean carrots,
the silver sink turning orange.
Running’s natural to most animals
who aren’t part
of a lecture series on Nature’s
Dead Ends. When I told him,
I saw he was looking for a place
in his brain to hide
his brain. I tried that later
with beer, it worked until I stood
at the toilet to make my little
waterfall, and thought of him
pushing back from a bar
to go make the same noise.
~ Bob Hicok,#NFDB
866:Mr Kingsley begins then by exclaiming- 'O the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-killing tyranny of Rome! We have not far to seek for an evidence of it. There's Father Newman to wit: one living specimen is worth a hundred dead ones. He, a Priest writing of Priests, tells us that lying is never any harm.'
I interpose: 'You are taking a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have said this, tell me when and where.'
Mr Kingsley replies: 'You said it, Reverend Sir, in a Sermon which you preached, when a Protestant, as Vicar of St Mary's, and published in 1844; and I could read you a very salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had at the time on my own opinion of you.'
I make answer: 'Oh...NOT, it seems, as a Priest speaking of Priests-but let us have the passage.'
Mr Kingsley relaxes: 'Do you know, I like your TONE. From your TONE I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that you did not mean what you said.'
I rejoin: 'MEAN it! I maintain I never SAID it, whether as a Protestant or as a Catholic.'
Mr Kingsley replies: 'I waive that point.'
I object: 'Is it possible! What? waive the main question! I either said it or I didn't. You have made a monstrous charge against me; direct, distinct, public. You are bound to prove it as directly, as distinctly, as publicly-or to own you can't.'
'Well,' says Mr Kingsley, 'if you are quite sure you did not say it, I'll take your word for it; I really will.'
My WORD! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my WORD that happened to be on trial. The WORD of a Professor of lying, that he does not lie!
But Mr Kingsley reassures me: 'We are both gentlemen,' he says: 'I have done as much as one English gentleman can expect from another.'
I begin to see: he thought me a gentleman at the very time he said I taught lying on system... ~ John Henry Newman,#NFDB
867:Mr Kingsley begins then by exclaiming- 'O the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-killing tyranny of Rome! We have not far to seek for an evidence of it. There's Father Newman to wit: one living specimen is worth a hundred dead ones. He, a Priest writing of Priests, tells us that lying is never any harm.'
I interpose: 'You are taking a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have said this, tell me when and where.'
Mr Kingsley replies: 'You said it, Reverend Sir, in a Sermon which you preached, when a Protestant, as Vicar of St Mary's, and published in 1844; and I could read you a very salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had at the time on my own opinion of you.'
I make answer: 'Oh...NOT, it seems, as a Priest speaking of Priests-but let us have the passage.'
Mr Kingsley relaxes: 'Do you know, I like your TONE. From your TONE I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that you did not mean what you said.'
I rejoin: 'MEAN it! I maintain I never SAID it, whether as a Protestant or as a Catholic.'
Mr Kingsley replies: 'I waive that point.'
I object: 'Is it possible! What? waive the main question! I either said it or I didn't. You have made a monstrous charge against me; direct, distinct, public. You are bound to prove it as directly, as distinctly, as publicly-or to own you can't.'
'Well,' says Mr Kingsley, 'if you are quite sure you did not say it, I'll take your word for it; I really will.'
My WORD! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my WORD that happened to be on trial. The WORD of a Professor of lying, that he does not lie!
But Mr Kingsley reassures me: 'We are both gentlemen,' he says: 'I have done as much as one English gentleman can expect from another.'
I begin to see: he thought me a gentleman at the very time he said I taught lying on system... ~ Saint John Henry Newman,#NFDB
868:You see Matt and Anthony every week. You see everyone every week.”
“Not everyone, Nick,” his mother said pointedly. Then her voice changed and turned warmer. “Well, except for this upcoming weekend.”
Nick paused at this. It could’ve been a trap. Perhaps his mother suspected something was up with her birthday and was fishing for information. Although it was surprising that she’d come to him—she usually went after Anthony, who had the secret-keeping skills of a four-year-old.
“Why? What’s happening this weekend?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Oh, nothing much. I just heard something about a sixtieth birthday party your father and you boys are planning for me.”
Fucking Anthony.
“And don’t go blaming Anthony,” his mother said, quick to protect her youngest. “I’d already heard about it from your aunt Donna before he slipped.”
Nick knew what her next question would be before the words left her mouth.
“So? Are you bringing a date?” she asked.
“Sorry, Ma. It’ll just be me.”
“There’s a surprise.”
He pulled into the driveway that led to the parking garage of his condo building. “Just a warning, I’m about to pull into the garage—I might lose you.”
“How convenient,” his mother said. “Because I had a really nice lecture planned for you.”
“Let me guess the highlights: it involved me needing to focus on something other than work, and you dying heartbroken and miserable without grandchildren. Am I close?”
“Not bad. But I’ll save the rest of the lecture for Sunday. There’s going to be a lot of gesturing on my part, and the phone doesn’t quite capture the spirit.”
Nick smiled. “Shockingly, I’m looking forward to it. I’ll see you Sunday, Ma.”
Her voice softened. “I know how busy you are, Nick. It means a lot to me that you’re coming home.”
He knew it did. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. ~ Julie James,#NFDB
869:Good to know,” Reacher said. “Tell your uncle no laws have been broken. Tell him he’s been paid for the room. Tell him I’ll see him later.” The guy on the right uncrossed his arms. The guy on the left said, “Are you going to be a problem?” “I’m already a problem,” Reacher said. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?” There was a pause, hot and lonely in the middle of nowhere, and then the two guys answered by brushing aside their coats, in tandem, casually, right-handed, both thereby showing black semi-automatic pistols, in pancake holsters, mounted on their belts. Which was a mistake, and Reacher could have told them why. He could have launched into a long and impatient classroom lecture, about sealing their fates by forcing a decisive battle too early, about short-circuiting a grander strategy by moving the endgame to the beginning. Threats had to be answered, which meant he was going to have to take their guns away, because probing pawns had to be sent back beaten, and because folks in Mother’s Rest needed to know for sure the next time he came to town he would be armed. He wanted to tell them it was their own fault. He wanted to tell them they had brought it on themselves. But he didn’t tell them anything. Instead he ducked his own hand under his own coat, grabbing at nothing but air, but the two guys didn’t know that, and like the good range-trained shooters they were they went for their guns and dropped into solid shooting stances all at once, which braced their feet a yard apart for stability, so Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow, scything backhand against his cheekbone, shattering it and causing a general lights-out everywhere. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
870:Reformation
A Gentleman, most wretched in his Lot,
A wrangling and reproving Wife had got,
Who, tho' she curb'd his Pleasures, and his Food,
Call'd him My Dear, and did it for his Good,
Ills to prevent; She of all Ills the worst,
So wisely Froward, and so kindly Curst.
The Servants too experiment her Lungs,
And find they've Breath to serve a thousand Tongues.
Nothing went on; for her eternal Clack
Still rectifying, set all Matters back;
Nor Town, nor Neighbours, nor the Court cou'd please,
But furnish'd Matter for her sharp Disease.
To distant Plains at length he gets her down,
With no Affairs to manage of her own;
Hoping from that unactive State to find
A calmer Habit, grown upon her Mind:
But soon return'd he hears her at his Door,
As noisy and tempestuous as before;
Yet mildly ask'd, How she her Days had spent
Amidst the Quiet of a sweet Content,
Where Shepherds 'tend their Flocks, and Maids their Pails,
And no harsh Mistress domineers, or rails?
Not rail! she cries–Why, I that had no share
In their Concerns, cou'd not the Trollops spare;
But told 'em, they were Sluts–And for the Swains,
My Name a Terror to them still remains;
So often I reprov'd their slothful Faults,
And with such Freedom told 'em all my Thoughts,
That I no more amongst them cou'd reside.
Has then, alas! the Gentleman reply'd,
One single Month so much their patience try'd?
Where you by Day, and but at Seasons due,
Cou'd with your Clamours their Defects pursue;
How had they shrunk, and justly been afraid,
Had they with me one Curtain Lecture heard!
Yet enter Madam, and resume your Sway;
Who can't Command, must silently Obey.
In secret here let endless Faults be found,
Till, like Reformers who in States abound,
120
You all to Ruin bring, and ev'ry Part confound.
~ Anne Kingsmill Finch,#NFDB
871:What kind of soldier are you that you’re going to just sit in a cell while the world is thrown into chaos? Do you not understand what could happen if those weapons fall into the wrong hands? How could you be so selfish? (Syd)
I’m selfish? Look, Agent Westbrook, your daddy’s a Boston stockbroker. I’m a death broker. I’m sure you don’t lecture Daddy on finance, so don’t even try to lecture me on assassination politics. I know all about them. Some bureaucratic ass-wipe sitting in a pristine office that’s totally isolated from the rest of the world decides the son of King Oomp-Loomp is a threat. He then hands down orders to people like me to go off King Oomp-Loompa’s son. Like an idiot, I do what he says without question. I hunt my target down, using information that is mostly bullshit and unreliable, gathered by someone like you who assured me it was correct as the time. But hey, if it changes minute by minute, and God forbid we pass that along to you. So me and my spotter lie in the grass, sand, or snow for days on end, cramped and hungry, never able to move more than a millimeter an hour until I have that one perfect shot I’ve been waiting for days. I take it, and then we lie there like pieces of dirt until we can inch our way back to safety, where hopefully the helicopter team will remember that they were supposed to retrieve us. Have you any idea of the nerves it takes to do what I do? To lie there on the ground while other armed men search for you? Have them step on you and not be able to even breathe or wince because if you do, it’s not only your life, but the life of your spotter? Do you know what it’s like to have the brains of your best friend spayed into your face and not be able to render aid to him because you know he’s dead and if you do, you’ll be killed too? I have been into the bowels of hell and back, Miz Westbrook. I have stared down the devil and made him sweat. So don’t tell me I don’t take this seriously. (Steele) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
872:Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave. ~ William Finnegan, #NFDB
873:He leaned back on his hands. And then idly turned to her. She inhaled, and exhaled an almost long-suffering sigh.
And he began in a patient, almost leisurely fashion, in a voice fashioned from dark velvet, a voice that stroked over her senses until they were lulled, to lecture directly to her as if she was a girl in the schoolroom.
"A proper kiss, Miss Eversea, should turn you inside out. It should... touch places in you that you didn't know existed, set them ablaze, until your entire being is hungry and wild. It should... hold a moment, I want to explain this as clearly as possible..." He tipped his head back and paused to consider, as though he were envisioning this and wanted to relate every detail correctly. "It should slice right down through you like a cutlass with a pleasure so devastating it's very nearly pain."
He waited, watching her face, allowing her to accommodate the potent words.
Her mouth was parted. Her breathing short. She couldn't look away. His eyes and voice held her as fast as if he'd cradled her face with his hands.
And as he said them, an echo of sensation sounded in her, like a remembered dream, an instinct awakened.
She thought about Mars getting ready to give Venus a good pleasuring.
Stop, she should say.
"And...?" she whispered.
"It should make you do battle for control of your senses and your will. It should make you want to do things you'd never dreamed you'd want to do, and in that moment all of those things will make perfect sense. And it should herald, or at least promise, the most intense physical pleasure you've ever known, regardless of whether that promise is ever, ever fulfilled. It should, in fact..." he paused for effect "haunt you for the rest of your life."
She sat wordlessly when he was done. As though waiting for the last notes of a stormy, discordant symphony to echo into silence.
'The most intense physical pleasure.'
His words reverberated in her. As if her body contained the ancient wisdom of what that meant, and now, having been reminded, craved it. ~ Julie Anne Long,#NFDB
874:The Temperance Army
Though you see no banded army,
Though you hear no cannons rattle,
We are in a mighty contest,
We are fighting a great battle.
We are few, but we are right:
And we wage the holy fight,
Night and day, and day and night.
If we do not fail or falter,
If we do not sleep or slumber,
We shall win in this great contest,
Though the foe is twice our number.
This the burden of our song,
'We are few, but we are strong,
And right must triumph over wrong.'
O my sisters! O my brothers!
There is death all round about us.
Must we, then, sit down discouraged?
Will you let the wine-cup rout us?
Hear the drunkard's awful wail!
See the mourners, bowed and pale!
Will you, coward, then say 'fail'?
Say not that your heart is with us
When you do not help or aid us.
All who love the cause sincerely
Can do something: God has made us
Tongues to talk with: you can say
Something, if you will, each day,
That will help us on our way,
Though you are not highly gifted,
Though you are not bard or poet,
Though you cannot preach or lecture,
695
You can love the cause, and show it
Boldly, in each thing you do.
Seeking all that's pure and true,
This will be a help from you.
You can say the liquor traffic
Is a curse to any nation;
You can say that prohibition
Is a blessing and salvation.
You can sow good seeds, and, though
You may never see them grow,
They will not be lost, I know.
In this mighty temperance contest,
Where no guns or cannons rattle,
Though you cannot lead the army
Or be chieftain of the battle,
With that mighty sword, the tongue,
You can fight against the wrong,
You can sing some temperance song.
Say not that you cannot aid us!
Drops of water make the riverMake the mighty Mississippi,
That flows on hand on for ever.
Every word you say for Right
Gives us courage, gives us might,
And brings nearer, morn and night.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB
875:In any case, Klossowski, mentioned again during Acéphale's sessional meeting of 25 July 1938, would later return to his opposition between Nietzsche and Bataille in a lecture given in 1941 at the end of a retreat in a Dominican monastery, 'Le Corps du néant', later printed in the first edition of his book Sade my Neighbour (1947) and which Bataille later told him he 'does not like'. Here Klossowski recapitulated the two stages in the evolution of Nietzsche's thought outlined in Löwith's essay 'Nietzsche and the doctrine of the Eternal Return', which he had reviewed in Acéphale 2:
1. Liberation from the Christian YOU MUST to achieve the I WANT of supra-nihilism;
2. Liberation from the I WANT to attain the I AM of superhumanity in the eternal return.
It is precisely in this 'cyclical movement', according to Klossowski, that man 'takes on the immeasurable responsibility of the death of God'. Furthermore, he associates Bataille's negation of God with the negation of utility upon which the notion of expenditure was founded, and hence the source of his 'absolute political nihilism'. His conclusion, however, was a little more ambiguous: 'In his desire to relive the Nietzschean experience of the death of God [...] he did not have the privilege [...] of suffering Nietzsche's punishment: the delirium that transfigures the executioner into a victim [...] To be guilty or not to be, that is his dilemma. His acephality expresses only the unease of a guilt in which conscience has become alienated because he has put faith to sleep: and this is to experience God in the manner of demons, as St. Augustine said'. Unlike Nietzsche. who 'accused himself' of causing the death of God 'in the name of all men' and paid for his guilt with madness, unlike Kirillov, the nihilist in Dostoyevsky's Demons who chose to commit suicide so as to kill men's fear of death and thus kill God himself, Bataille shows us this frightful torment of not being able to make his guilt real and so attain that state of responsibility that gives knowledge of the path to absolution. ~ Georges Bataille,#NFDB
876:The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning “contemplation, meditation.” Contemplation, however, of what?
Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall where I originally presented the material for this chapter. Above, we see the many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other. Regarded that way, they are so many empirical facts; and the whole universe seen that way is called in Japanese ji hokkai, “the universe of things.”
But now, let us consider further. Each of those separate bulbs is a vehicle of light, and the light is not many but one. The one light, that is to say, is being displayed through all those bulbs; and we may think, therefore, either of the many bulbs or of the one light. Moreover, if this or that bulb went out, it would be replaced by another and we should again have the same light. The light, which is one, appears thus through many bulbs.
Analogously, I would be looking out from the lecture platform, seeing before me all the people of my audience, and just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his consciousness. And although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all. These are but two ways of interpreting and experiencing the same set of present facts. One way is not truer than the other. They are just two ways of interpreting and experiencing: the first, in terms of the manifold of separate things; the second, in terms of the one thing that is made manifest through this manifold. And as, in Japanese, the first is known as ji hokkai, so the second is ri hokkai, the absolute universe. ~ Joseph Campbell,#NFDB
877:Lily fought like a lynx caught in a steel trap. She scratched and bit and kicked with a force that took Connell by surprise. Her teeth sank into the sensitive flesh of his palm and forced him to let go. “Calm down, Lily. It’s just me, Connell.” The beginning of her scream died away, and she spun on him, her eyes flashing with fury. “Why did you sneak up on me like that?” “I didn’t mean to.” He brought his smarting hand to his mouth and sucked at the blood she’d drawn. “When you didn’t hear me approach, I thought I might startle you. And I didn’t want you to scream—a sure way to get every shanty boy in the camp to come running.” The tempest in her eyes turned into a low gale. He glanced at the teeth marks she’d left in his hand. “You sure know how to greet a fellow.” “And you sure know how to scare a girl half to death.” “Why exactly were you so scared?” “Because I thought you were someone else.” “And what if I had been someone else?” She paused, her pretty lips stalled around the shape of her next word. “Any number of the rough men from this camp could have followed you out here.” He’d seen the way the men were looking at her, how they hadn’t been able to take their eyes off her from the moment she’d arrived. “What would you have done then?” When she’d run off into the woods after the stupid cat, he’d had to yell at several of the men to stop them from chasing after her. “I would have screamed.” She pulled herself up to her full height, which he estimated to be five feet six inches. “Since apparently I’d get lots of attention that way.” “I’m serious,” he started. But then at the glimpse of the twinkle in her eyes, his ready lecture stalled. He stuck his aching hand into his pocket and pressed his wound against the scratchy wool. “I appreciate your concern,” she offered with the hint of a smile. “But I’m a much stronger woman than you realize.” She’d be no match for any of his strong shanty boys. “You were reckless to wander off by yourself.” He tried to soften his accusation, but he wanted her to realize the constant danger she was in simply by being an attractive woman in a place populated by lusty men. “I strongly suggest you refrain from doing so again—especially if you hope to avoid any further run-ins. ~ Jody Hedlund, #NFDB
878:Yet change is usually stressful, and after a certain age, most people don’t like to change. When you are 16, your entire life is change, whether you like it or not. Your body is changing, your mind is changing, your relationships are changing—everything is in flux. You are busy inventing yourself. By the time you are 40, you don’t want change. You want stability. But in the twenty-first century, you won’t be able to enjoy that luxury. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, some stable job, some stable worldview, you will be left behind, and the world will fly by you. So people will need to be extremely resilient and emotionally balanced to sail through this never-ending storm, and to deal with very high levels of stress. The problem is that it is very hard to teach emotional intelligence and resilience. It is not something you can learn by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The current educational model, devised during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, is bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. So don’t trust the adults too much. In the past, it was a safe bet to trust adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the 21st century is going to be different. Whatever the adults have learned about economics, politics, or relationships may be outdated. Similarly, don’t trust technology too much. You must make technology serve you, instead of you serving it. If you aren’t careful, technology will start dictating your aims and enslaving you to its agenda. So you have no choice but to really get to know yourself better. Know who you are and what you really want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. But this advice has never been more urgent than in the 21st century. Because now you have competition. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the government are all relying on big data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. We are not living in the era of hacking computers—we are living in the era of hacking humans. Once the corporations and governments know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you and you won’t even realize it. So if you want to stay in the game, you have to run faster than Google. Good luck! ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
879:Dammit, Holly, I'd never have believed you'd do something so harebrained. Do you understand that the building could have collapsed around you and those henwits? I know what condition those places are in, and I wouldn't let a dog of mine venture past the threshold, much less my wife. And the men—good God, when I think of the low-living bastards who were in your vicinity, it makes my blood curdle! Sailors and drunkards on every corner—do you know what would happen if one of them took it into his head to snap up a little treat like you?” As the thought seemed to temporarily render him incapable of speech, Holly took the opportunity to defend herself. “I was with companions, and—” “Ladies,” he said savagely. “Armed with umbrellas, no doubt. Just what do you think they would have been able to do, had you met with bad company?” “The few men we encountered in the neighborhood were harmless,” Holly argued. “In fact, it was the very same place you lived in during your childhood, and those men were no different from you—” “In those days, I'd have played merry hell with you, if I'd managed to get my hands on you,” he said harshly. “Have no illusions, milady… you'd have ended face-to-the wall in Maidenhead Lane with your skirts around your waist. The only wonder is that you didn't meet that fate with some randy sailor yesterday.” “You're exaggerating,” Holly said defensively, but that only roused his temper to a higher pitch. He continued to blister her ears with a lecture that was furious and insulting by turns, naming the various diseases she could have contracted and the vermin she had likely encountered, until Holly couldn't bear another word. “I've heard enough,” she cried hotly. “It's clear to me that I'm not to make a single decision without asking your permission first—I'm to be treated as a child, and you will act as a dictator.” The accusation was unfair, and she knew it, but she was too incensed to care. Suddenly his fury seemed to evaporate, and he stared at her with an inscrutable gaze. A long moment passed before he spoke again. “You wouldn't have taken Rose to such a place, would you?” “Of course not! But she is a little girl, and I'm—” “My life,” he interrupted quietly. “You're my entire life. If anything ever happens to you, Holly, there is nothing left for me. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
880:Although he said more about hell than most other subjects, Jesus had a very short fuse with those who appeared enthusiastic about the idea of people suffering eternally. Once, after being rejected by a village of Samaritans, Jesus’ disciples asked him for permission to call fire down from heaven to destroy the Samaritans. Jesus’ response was to rebuke his disciples for thinking such a harsh thing.[1] His response makes me wonder what to do with a subject like hell. On one hand, Jesus indicated that the fire of hell is an appropriate punishment for sin.[2] On the other, he got very upset with anyone suggesting that someone else should go there...Howard Thurman, a predecessor to Dr. King and an African American scholar and minister, gave a lecture at Harvard in 1947 during the pre–civil rights era. In that lecture he shared these words: “Can you imagine a slave saying, ‘I and all my children and grandchildren are consigned to lives of endless brutality and grinding poverty? There’s no judgment day in which any wrongdoing will ever be put right?’”[15] Volf and Thurman are saying the same thing: if there is no final judgment, then there is really no hope for a slave, a rape victim, a child who has been abused or bullied, or people who have been slandered or robbed or had their dignity taken from them. If nobody is ultimately called to account for violence and oppression, then the victims will not see justice, ever. They will be left to conclude the same thing that Elie Wiesel concluded after the Holocaust stripped him of his mother, his father, his sister, and his faith: “I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God. . . . Without love or mercy.”[16] If we insist on a universe in which there is no final reckoning for evil, this is what we are left with. To accept that God is a lover but not a judge is a luxury that only the privileged and protected can enjoy. What I’m saying here is that we need a God who gets angry. We need a God who will protect his kids, who will once and for all remove the bullies and the perpetrators of evil from his playground. Those who cannot or will not appreciate this have likely enjoyed a very sheltered life and are therefore naive about the emotional impact of oppression, cruelty, and injustice. To accept that God is a lover but not a judge is a luxury that only the privileged and protected can enjoy. ~ Scott Sauls, #NFDB
881:I drive into the high school parking lot with my mind more on my sister than on the road. My wheels screech to a stop when I almost hit a guy and girl on a motorcycle. I thought it was an empty parking space.
“Watch it, bitch,” Carmen Sanchez, the girl on the back of the motorcycle, says as she flips me the finger.
She obviously missed the Road Rage lecture in Driver’s Ed.
“Sorry,” I say loudly so I can be heard over the roar of the motorcycle. “It didn’t look like anyone was in this spot.”
Then I realize whose motorcycle I almost hit. The driver turns around. Angry dark eyes. Red and black bandana. I sink down into the driver’s seat as far as I can.
“Oh, shit. It’s Alex Fuentes,” I say, wincing.
“Jesus, Brit,” Sierra says, her voice low. “I’d like to live to see graduation. Get outta here before he decides to kill us both.”
Alex is staring at me with his devil eyes while putting the kickstand down on his motorcycle. Is he going to confront me?
I search for reverse, frantically moving the stick back and forth. Or course it’s no surprise my dad bought me a car with a stick shift without taking the time to teach me how to master driving the thing.
Alex takes a step toward my car. My instincts tell me to abandon the car and flee, as if I was stuck on railroad tracks with a train heading straight for me. I glance at Sierra, who’s desperately searching through her purse for something. Is she kidding me?
“I can’t get this damn car in reverse. I need help. What are you looking for?” I ask.
“Like…nothing. I’m trying not to make eye contact with those Latino Bloods. Get a move on, will ya?” Sierra responds through gritted teeth. “Besides, I only know how to drive an automatic.”
Finally grinding into reverse, my wheels screech loud and hard as I maneuver backward and search for another parking spot.
After parking in the west lot, far from a certain gang member with a reputation that could scare off even the toughest Fairfield football players, Sierra and I walk up the front steps of Fairfield High. Unfortunately, Alex Fuentes and the rest of his gang friends are hanging by the front doors.
“Walk right past them,” Sierra mutters. “Whatever you do, don’t look in their eyes.”
It’s pretty hard not to when Alex Fuentes steps right in front of me and blocks my path.
What’s that prayer you’re supposed to say right before you know you’re going to die? ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
882:Tell me you didn’t,” she groaned, knowing it would not be the truth. “Please tell me you didn’t take advantage of these poor people.”
“I didn’t,” he chirped.
“Liar.”
With an irritated sigh he tried to convince her. “Amora, you’re not seeing things from an immortal perspective. The people who built this temple…”
“Temple?” she cried, cutting him off. “You forced these people to build you a temple? Why? Because all of a sudden you’re God now?”
Perturbed by her interruption, he raised a warning finger. “No, no, Amora, not God. But from their viewpoint I may seem a bit…..god-like.”
She rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner.
“If you would let me finish,” he went on, “these particular individuals had no part in the construction of that monument; it was their ancestors who erected it. And I must say, they did a fine job. My likeness has weathered the centuries quite well.”
“You’re despicable.”
He frowned at the insult. “Nobody was forced to build us a temple, Amora. They chose to do so.”
“You were that impressive to them, huh?”
“Apparently.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. He took a few steps toward the distant city, pulling Eena along. “Come on, let’s go have some fun.”
“No way.” She planted her feet, refusing. Surprisingly it put a stop to him.
“And why not?”
“Because your sudden appearance will upset them! No doubt you’ll want to show off with some shockingly grand entrance. I’m not going to take part in a game of deceit.”
“I’m not deceiving anyone,” Edgar disputed. “I can’t help it if they happen to think I’m perfectly magnificent.”
His pompous view of himself earned a nasty look as well as a lecture. “I can’t believe you’re okay with selling people lies that affect the way they live and think! You’re not even close to being a god, Edgar, and yet you allow them to accept you as some sort of deity because of your unusual abilities. For centuries now you’ve abandoned this world and a population who probably looked to you and your lousy sisters for help. It’s all a big, disgusting sham!”
Edgar pouted like a child. “Fine—spoil all my fun. We’ll go do something else. Something that doesn’t include your poor, fragile, stupid mortals.”
“They’re not stupid.”
“They think I’m a god,” he snapped.
That was a pretty good argument. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
883:Don’t you want to know what your father and I discussed?” “No. I mean, not unless you want me to know. I understand that you might want to keep that conversation private.” “Really? That’s very mature of you.” He leaned back on the chaise, closing his eyes, a hint of a smile playing across his lips. “Thank you.” She folded her hands in her lap, not knowing what to say. She couldn’t ask. That wasn’t very ladylike. They sat in silence for what seemed like an eternity, until she was certain she would go mad with curiosity. “Fine! Yes! Of course, I want to know!” Before the words had left her lips, he had started to laugh. “Nine seconds. That’s how long you could go without asking.” She smiled. “Truly? It felt like much longer. A quarter of an hour at least.” He laughed again, pulling her to him, letting her rest her head on his chest. She could hear his heartbeat beneath her ear, slow and steady. When he spoke, she felt the words as much as she heard them. “We talked about my being in love with you. And about my wanting to court you.” Her heart began to pound. “And what did he say?” “He launched into a remarkably detailed lecture regarding the proper order of events when making this kind of request. Specifically, he thought the father should be consulted before the daughter runs any risk whatsoever of being ruined.” She winced, flushing with embarrassment at the idea that her father thought she might be ruined. She looked up at him and said, “What did you say?” “You have beautiful eyes.” “You told my father that he has beautiful eyes?” He smiled. “No. You distracted me. I told your father that, while I was very grateful for the lesson, I doubted I would ever have need of it again—because I was planning to court only one woman in my lifetime.” Her breath caught. “And what did he say?” “Does it matter?” “Not entirely, no.” “You realize that if you allow me to court you, all your opposition to marriage is going to have to be reconsidered.” She smiled, feigning innocence. “What opposition to marriage?” “Excellent.” “But I am thinking we should have a long courtship.” “Why?” He looked surprised. “Because I find I’ve developed a taste for adventure.” “That sounds dangerous. Not at all in character for a delicate flower.” She laughed. “We know I’ve never been good at being a delicate flower. Besides, it shan’t be too dangerous.” “How can you be so sure?” She smiled brilliantly at him, taking his breath away. “Because, on my next adventure, I’ll have you by my side.” He ~ Sarah MacLean, #NFDB
884:Steldor was sitting up on the bed across the room, his legs swung over the side, pulling a shirt carefully over his head.
“Should you be doing that so soon?” I asked, for it had only been a week since the lashing.
The garment fell over his muscular chest, and he ran a hand through his dark hair. He came to his feet with the hint of a wince.
“Making sure I’m cared for is no longer your worry. I’m not certain it ever was.”
His mood was a bit dark, and I wondered if I should have given him more time to recover before paying him this visit.
“Perhaps what you need is someone to keep you from coming to harm in the first place.”
He smirked, turning his back to me to idly straighten his bed coverings. “What is it--did you come here to coddle me or lecture me?”
“Both, I suppose.” I was frowning, amazed at how swiftly we had fallen into our old patterns. “I’ve come to talk--and to give you this.”
He swiveled to face me as I removed his silver wolf’s head talisman from the pocket of my cloak.
“I never expected to see that again,” he said, sounding awed. “Did you face the bitch yourself or get it from Narian?”
I smiled at his word choice. “I approached Rava myself--I’ve been known to face down a bitch or two.” He stepped forward to take the pendant from my hand and immediately slipped the chain over his head.
“Thank you. I feel better already.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what is the significance of the talisman? When I reclaimed it from Rava, she remarked that it might provide power and protection, and that started me thinking about its purpose.”
He chuckled ruefully. “I hate to admit it, but Rava’s right. The wolf brings strength and protection. Depending on the mix of herbs and flowers put inside the talisman, other properties can be added, such as health and healing. The captain gave the pendant to me when I was four, following the death of Terek, at the time I was sent to live with Baelic and Lania. He didn’t want me to think he’d abandoned me or that I was in danger. It was originally his, and his father’s before him. I’ve worn it ever since.”
“Then I’m very glad I was able to secure its return.”
His eyes met mine, and the color rose in my cheeks, for I was still affected to some degree by his handsome features and soldier’s build.
“I suppose that concludes the coddling,” he finally said, crossing his arms and watching me expectantly.
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“Then let the lecture begin.” He spread his hands, giving me a slight nod. ~ Cayla Kluver,#NFDB
885:The best advice came from the legendary actor the late Sir John Mills, who I sat next to backstage at a lecture we were doing together. He told me he considered the key to public speaking to be this: “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.”
Inspired words. And it changed the way I spoke publicly from then on. Keep it short. Keep it from the heart.
Men tend to think that they have to be funny, witty, or incisive onstage. You don’t. You just have to be honest. If you can be intimate and give the inside story--emotions, doubts, struggles, fears, the lot--then people will respond.
I went on to give thanks all around the world to some of the biggest corporations in business--and I always tried to live by that. Make it personal, and people will stand beside you.
As I started to do bigger and bigger events for companies, I wrongly assumed that I should, in turn, start to look much smarter and speak more “corporately.” I was dead wrong--and I learned that fast. When we pretend, people get bored.
But stay yourself, talk intimately, and keep the message simple, and it doesn’t matter what the hell you wear.
It does, though, take courage, in front of five thousand people, to open yourself up and say you really struggle with self-doubt. Especially when you are meant to be there as a motivational speaker.
But if you keep it real, then you give people something real to take away.
“If he can, then so can I” is always going to be a powerful message. For kids, for businessmen--and for aspiring adventurers.
I really am pretty average. I promise you. Ask Shara…ask Hugo.
I am ordinary, but I am determined.
I did, though--as the corporation started to pay me more--begin to doubt whether I was really worth the money. It all seemed kind of weird to me. I mean, was my talk a hundred times better now than the one I gave in the Drakensberg Mountains?
No.
But on the other hand, if you can help people feel stronger and more capable because of what you tell them, then it becomes worthwhile for companies in ways that are impossible to quantify.
If that wasn’t true, then I wouldn’t get asked to speak so often, still to this day.
And the story of Everest--a mountain, like life, and like business--is always going to work as a metaphor. You have got to work together, work hard, and go the extra mile. Look after each other, be ambitious, and take calculated, well-timed risks.
Give your heart to the goal, and it will repay you.
Now, are we talking business or climbing?
That’s what I mean. ~ Bear Grylls,#NFDB
886:It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.
At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. ~ William James,#NFDB
887:Meanwhile, in a lecture at the Sverdlov University two years later, under the
pressure of outside events and interior realities, Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the
indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State. "With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall
crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more
people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving,
when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside. Then there will be neither
State nor exploitation." Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single
oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist. It also will be obliged to increase in
strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the governments responsible for injustice, the
obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own interests. And when, on an earth that has
finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and
the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will
be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.
Under the easily predictable pressure of adverse imperialism, the imperialism of justice was born, in reality, with
Lenin. But imperialism, even the imperialism of justice, has no other end but defeat or world empire. Until
then it has no other means but injustice. From now on, the doctrine is definitively identified with the
prophecy. For the sake of justice in the far-away future, it authorizes injustice throughout the entire course
of history and becomes the type of mystification which Lenin detested more than anything else in the
world. It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still
greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a
moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into
its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a
formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the
equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
888:Did the Führer take her (mother) away?”
The question surprised them both, and it forced Papa to stand up. He looked at
the brown-shirted men taking to the pile of ash with shovels. He could hear them
hacking into it. Another lie was growing in his mouth, but he found it impossible
to let it out. He said, “I think he might have, yes.”
“I knew it.” The words were thrown at the steps and Liesel could feel the
slush of anger, stirring hotly in her stomach. “I hate the Führer,” she said. “I hate
him.”
And Hans Hubermann?
What did he do?
What did he say?
Did he bend down and embrace his foster daughter, as he wanted to? Did he
tell her that he was sorry for what was happening to her, to her mother, for what
had happened to her brother?
Not exactly.
He clenched his eyes. Then opened them. He slapped Liesel Meminger
squarely in the face.
“Don’t ever say that!” His voice was quiet, but sharp.
As the girl shook and sagged on the steps, he sat next to her and held his face
in his hands. It would be easy to say that he was just a tall man sitting poorpostured
and shattered on some church steps, but he wasn’t. At the time, Liesel
had no idea that her foster father, Hans Hubermann, was contemplating one of
the most dangerous dilemmas a German citizen could face. Not only that, he’d
been facing it for close to a year.
“Papa?”
The surprise in her voice rushed her, but it also rendered her useless. She
wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She could take a Watschen from nuns and Rosas,
but it hurt so much more from Papa. The hands were gone from Papa’s face now
and he found the resolve to speak again.
“You can say that in our house,” he said, looking gravely at Liesel’s cheek.
“But you never say it on the street, at school, at the BDM, never!” He stood in
front of her and lifted her by the triceps. He shook her. “Do you hear me?”
With her eyes trapped wide open, Liesel nodded her compliance.
It was, in fact, a rehearsal for a future lecture, when all of Hans Hubermann’s
worst fears arrived on Himmel Street later that year, in the early hours of a
November morning.
“Good.” He placed her back down. “Now, let us try …” At the bottom of the
steps, Papa stood erect and cocked his arm. Forty-five degrees. “Heil Hitler.”
Liesel stood up and also raised her arm. With absolute misery, she repeated it.
“Heil Hitler.” It was quite a sight—an eleven-year-old girl, trying not to cry on
the church steps, saluting the Führer as the voices over Papa’s shoulder chopped
and beat at the dark shape in the background. ~ Markus Zusak,#NFDB
889:hasn’t been missing long. If she’s upset, she’ll go someplace where she feels safe.” “But she might not be thinking clearly,” Adelia protested, her panic returning. “She’s only thirteen, Gabe. I’m afraid I’ve been forgetting that myself. I should have been paying more attention. Instead, I was so worried about my younger kids, I missed all the signs that Selena was in real trouble. I was just grateful that she was no longer rebelling against the world.” In front of the gym, she bolted from the car practically before it could come to a stop. Inside, she scanned the room until her gaze landed on her brother. He regarded her with alarm, which grew visibly when Gabe came in right on her heels. Misreading the situation, Elliott stepped between them. “Is this guy bothering you, Adelia?” She held up a hand. “No, it’s nothing like that. Selena’s missing. Gabe is helping me look for her. I thought maybe she’d come here to see you.” Elliott shook his head. “I haven’t seen her. Let me check with Karen. She’s not working today. She’s at the house with the baby.” Adelia felt herself starting to shake as her brother made the call to his wife. Then she felt Gabe’s steadying hand on her shoulder. He didn’t say a word, just kept his hand there until the moment passed. Elliott listened intently to whatever Karen was saying, his expression brightening. “Thanks, querida. Adelia will be there in a few minutes.” Smiling, he turned to her. “Selena’s at my house playing with the baby. Karen didn’t think to call anyone because Selena told her she only had a half day at school and swore you knew where she was.” Adelia finally let out the breath she felt like she’d been holding for hours. “Of course Karen believed her,” she said wryly. “Selena’s very convincing when she wants to be.” “Want me to drive you over there?” Elliott offered. “I can get one of the other trainers to take my next client.” “I can take her,” Gabe said. He looked at her. “Unless you’d prefer to have your brother go with you.” Adelia hesitated, then shook her head. “If you don’t mind making the drive, that would be great,” she told him. “Elliott, there’s no reason for you to miss an appointment. I can handle this.” Elliott looked worried but eventually nodded. “You’ll be there when I get home? I want to have a talk with my niece about skipping school and worrying you.” She smiled. “Believe me, she’ll get more than enough talking from me tonight. You can save your lecture for another day.” Elliott nodded with unmistakable reluctance. “Whatever you think, but I will have a word with her. You can be sure of that.” “Not a doubt in my mind,” she said, then turned to Gabe. “Let’s go. That ~ Sherryl Woods, #NFDB
890:Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.”
The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous. ~ Peggy Orenstein,#NFDB
891:You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers. ~ M J Nicholls, #NFDB
892:Je me mis dès lors à lire avec avidité et bientôt la lecture fut ma passion. Tous mes nouveaux besoins, toutes mes aspirations récentes, tous les élans encore vagues de mon adolescence qui s’élevaient dans mon âme d’une façon si troublante et qui étaient provoqués par mon développement si précoce, tout cela, soudainement, se précipita dans une direction, parut se satisfaire complètement de ce nouvel aliment et trouver là son cours régulier. Bientôt mon cœur et ma tête se trouvèrent si charmés, bientôt ma fantaisie se développa si largement, que j’avais l’air d’oublier tout ce qui m’avait entourée jusqu’alors. Il semblait que le sort lui même m’arrêtât sur le seuil de la nouvelle vie dans laquelle je me jetais, à laquelle je pensais jour et nuit, et, avant de m’abandonner sur la route immense, me faisait gravir une hauteur d’où je pouvais contempler l’avenir dans un merveilleux panorama, sous une perspective brillante, ensorcelante. Je me voyais destinée à vivre tout cet avenir en l’apprenant d’abord par les livres ; de vivre dans les rêves, les espoirs, la douce émotion de mon esprit juvénile. Je commençai mes lectures sans aucun choix, par le premier livre qui me tomba sous la main. Mais, le destin veillait sur moi. Ce que j’avais appris et vécu jusqu’à ce jour était si noble, si austère, qu’une page impure ou mauvaise n’eût pu désormais me séduire. Mon instinct d’enfant, ma précocité, tout mon passé veillaient sur moi ; et maintenant ma conscience m’éclairait toute ma vie passée.
En effet, presque chacune des pages que je lisais m’était déjà connue, semblait déjà vécue, comme si toutes ces passions, toute cette vie qui se dressaient devant moi sous des formes inattendues, en des tableaux merveilleux, je les avais déjà éprouvées.
Et comment pouvais-je ne pas être entraînée jusqu’à l’oubli du présent, jusqu’à l’oubli de la réalité, quand, devant moi dans chaque livre que je lisais, se dressaient les lois d’une même destinée, le même esprit d’aventure qui règnent sur la vie de l’homme, mais qui découlent de la loi fondamentale de la vie humaine et sont la condition de son salut et de son bonheur ! C’est cette loi que je soupçonnais, que je tâchais de deviner par toutes mes forces, par tous mes instincts, puis presque par un sentiment de sauvegarde. On avait l’air de me prévenir, comme s’il y avait en mon âme quelque chose de prophétique, et chaque jour l’espoir grandissait, tandis qu’en même temps croissait de plus en plus mon désir de me jeter dans cet avenir, dans cette vie. Mais, comme je l’ai déjà dit, ma fantaisie l’emportait sur mon impatience, et, en vérité, je n’étais très hardie qu’en rêve ; dans la réalité, je demeurais instinctivement timide devant l’avenir. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
893:To have a goddess like you in his arms and not appreciate it…”
He kissed her, unable to resist the lush, succulent mouth so close to his. He put everything he felt into it, so he could wipe out any hurt the Neds of the world had given her.
When he broke away, realizing he was treading dangerous ground, she said hoarsely, “You weren’t always so…appreciative. When I said that men enjoyed my company, you said you found that hard to believe.”
“What?” he retorted with a scowl. “I never said any such thing.”
“Yes, you did, the day that I asked you to investigate my suitors. I remember it clearly.”
“There’s no way in hell I ever…” The conversation came back to him suddenly, and he shook his head. “You’re remembering only part, sweeting. You said that men enjoyed your company and considered you easy to talk to. It was the last part I found hard to believe.”
“Oh.” She eyed him askance. “Why? You never seem to have trouble talking to me. Or rather, lecturing me.”
“It’s either lecture you or stop up your mouth with kisses,” he said dryly. “Talking to you isn’t easy, because every time I’m near you I burn to carry you off to some secluded spot and do any number of wicked things with you.”
She blinked, then gazed at him with such softness that at made his chest hurt. “Then why don’t you?”
“Because you’re a marquess’s daughter and my employer’s sister.”
“What does that signify? You’re an assistant magistrate and a famous Bow Street Runner-“
“And the bastard of nobody knows whom.”
“Which merely makes you a fitting companion for a hellion with a reputation for recklessness.”
The word companion resonated in his brain. What did she mean by it?
Then she pressed a kiss to his jaw, eroding his resistance and his reason, and he knew precisely what she meant.
He tried to set her off of him before he lost his mind entirely, but she looped her arms about his neck and wouldn’t let go. “Show me.”
“Show you what?”
“All the wicked things you want to do with me.”
Desire bolted in a fever through his vein. “My God, Celia-“
“I won’t believe a word you’ve said if you don’t.” Her gaze grew troubled. “I don’t think you know what you want. Yesterday you gave me such lovely kisses and caresses and then at the ball you acted like you’d never met me.”
“You were with your suitors,” he said hoarsely.
“You could have danced with me. You didn’t even ask me for one dance.”
Having her on his lap was rousing him to a painful hardness. “Because I knew if I did, I would want…I would need…”
She kissed a path down his throat, turning his blood to fire. “Show me,” she whispered, “Show me now what you want. What you need.”
“I refuse to ruin you,” he said, half as a caution to himself.
“You already have. ~ Sabrina Jeffries,#NFDB
894:The captain gave the pendant to me when I was four, following the death of Terek, at the time I was sent to live with Baelic and Lania. He didn’t want me to think he’d abandoned me or that I was in danger. It was originally his, and his father’s before him. I’ve worn it ever since.”
“Then I’m very glad I was able to secure its return.”
His eyes met mine, and the color rose in my cheeks, for I was still affected to some degree by his handsome features and soldier’s build.
“I suppose that concludes the coddling,” he finally said, crossing his arms and watching me expectantly.
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“Then let the lecture begin.” He spread his hands, giving me a slight nod.
“You were part of that revolt,” I accused.
“Yes.”
I hesitated, his honesty taking my words away, and he sat stiffly on the edge of the bed, his back obviously ailing him.
“Why can’t you trust what I’m doing, Steldor? Why can’t you share my goals?”
“You’re asking me to trust Narian,” he said with a condescending laugh.
“That’s the reason? Because you can’t stand being on his side?”
Steldor rolled his eyes. “This had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with our freedom. We fought too hard and lost too many good men to let this kingdom perish without one more battle. Now the battle’s been waged. Just be satisfied with that.”
He was bitter, and in many ways, I didn’t blame him. But this was my chance to impress reality upon him.
“Will you be satisfied with that? I’ve been advising you, advising everyone on the course that makes the most sense for our people. If you had listened to me, not tried to undercut my efforts, you wouldn’t be hurt right now, London wouldn’t be hiding in the mountains and Halias and his men wouldn’t be dead.”
He glared at me, his anger beginning to simmer, which only increased my fervor.
“Look at you.” I gestured toward him, for he could not disguise his pain, nor hide the fever that brought beads of sweat to his forehead. “You did this to yourself, Steldor. You punished yourself with your actions, but nothing else was accomplished. You just wanted to be a martyr.”
“What’s wrong with that?” he shot back. “You want to be a saint! You want to be the one who brings peace to these people. You’re the one who brought war, Alera. You’re the reason Narian didn’t leave for good when he fled Hytanica. He loves you, and that’s why--”
He stopped talking, unable to make himself complete that sentence.
“You’re right about one thing,” I whispered in the dead silence. “Narian loves me, but what you won’t acknowledge is that he’s the reason any of us still have our lives. He’s the reason you weren’t killed for that show you put on.”
“Extend my thanks,” he said, tone laden with sarcasm. ~ Cayla Kluver,#NFDB
895:Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?
I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice?
Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline.
The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.”
Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.”
Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death.
To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight. ~ Stephen King,#NFDB
896:Marriage meant jointures and pin money and siring an heir to continue the dynasty. A cottage meant just him and Maria.
What a fool he was. Even a woman with Maria’s low connections wanted more. And he couldn’t give it. The very thought of attempting it made him ill, because he could never make her happy. He would muck it up, and the legacy of misery would go on.
But he’d be damned if he’d watch her throw herself away on that fool Hyatt. She deserved better than an indifferent fiancé who had no clue how to make her eyes darken in passion as she shuddered and trembled and gave her mouth so sweetly…
He groaned. He shouldn’t have gone so far with her. It had frightened her. Worse yet, his reaction to it bloody well terrified him-because he’d give a great deal to be able to do it again. He’d never felt that way for any other woman.
Freddy was still blathering on, and suddenly a word arrested him.
“What was that you said?” Oliver asked.
“The beefsteak needed a bit more salt-“
“Before that,” he ground out.
“Oh. Right. There was a chap in that club claiming he was your cousin. Mr. Desmond Plumtree, I think.”
His stomach sank. When had Desmond gained membership at such a selective club? Did it mean the bastard was finally becoming accepted in society?
“Though if you ask me,” Freddy went on, “with family like him, who needs enemies? Insulting fellow. Told me a bunch of nonsense about how you’d killed your father and everybody knew it.” Freddy sniffed. “I told him he was a scurrilous lout, and if he couldn’t see that you were a good sort of chap, then he was as blind as a town crier with a broken lantern. And he didn’t belong in the Blue Swan with all those amiable gents, neither.”
For a moment, speech utterly failed Oliver. He could only imagine Desmond’s reaction to that little lecture. “And…er…what did he say?”
“He looked surprised, then muttered something about playing cards and trotted off to a card room. Good riddance, too-he was eating up all the macaroons.”
Oliver gaped at him, then began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You and Maria-don’t you Americans ever pay attention to gossip?”
“Well, sure, if it makes sense. But that didn’t make sense. If everybody knew you’d killed your father, you’d have been hanged by now. Since you’re sitting right here, you can’t have done it.” Freddy tapped his forehead. “Simple logic is all.”
“Right,” Oliver said. “Simple logic.” A lump caught in his throat. Maria’s defending him was one thing; she was a woman and softhearted, though that had certainly never kept any other woman from gossiping about him.
But to have an impressionable pup like Freddy defend him…he didn’t know whether to scoff at the fellow’s naivete or clap him on the shoulder and pronounce him a “good sort of chap” as well. ~ Sabrina Jeffries,#NFDB
897:Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!”
“Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.”
“Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?”
“Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.”
(...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?”
“Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself.
“You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you. ~ John C Wright,#NFDB
898:When I Have to Confess Something to My Husband Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. JAMES 5:16 THERE ARE TIMES in every wife’s life when she needs to confess something to her husband that will be hard for him to hear. For example, if she has dented the car, or spent too much money, or overdrawn the bank account, or accidentally given away his favorite football shirt—or something even worse—and she knows his reaction to what she has to tell him will not be good, she needs help from above. If this happens to you, the thing to do is pray before you speak. If you have something to tell your husband you know he will not approve of, ask God to help you break it to him in the best way possible. Don’t just blurt it out. Ask God to prepare your husband’s heart to hear hard things without having a bad reaction to them. Ask the Lord to give you the right words to say and the right time to say it. There may be occasions when your husband needs to confess something to you, and you will want to set a good example of calm and patience for him to want to emulate. If you feel your husband overreacts to things, pray that God will give him a compassionate and understanding heart and an even temper. Ask God to plant in him the desire to pray for you instead of criticize or lecture. After you seek your husband’s forgiveness, tell him how effective it would be to pray together about this so that it never happens again. My Prayer to God LORD, help me to speak to my husband about what I know I need to confess to him. Give me the words to say. Open his heart to receive what I need to tell him with a good and godly attitude. If it is something I know I did wrong, help me to not do it again. Give me the wisdom and discernment I need to avoid that in the future. Where it is something I did that I feel was not wrong, but I know he will not be happy about it, help us to talk calmly and peacefully about this issue. Enable us to come to an agreement regarding what should be done in the future. Give my husband and me compassionate attitudes that don’t resort to anger. Help us to talk peacefully and come to a mutual understanding so that we always exhibit respect for each other. Teach us to believe for the best in each other. When I have to confess something that is hard for him to hear, reign in both of our hearts so that our words glorify You. Where there are things that should be confessed to each other but have been hidden because of not wanting to stir up anything negative, I pray You would help us to get these things out in the open honestly. Your Word says that confessing our trespasses—both to You and to each other—can be a prelude to healing, not only of body and soul but also of our relationship and marriage. Enable us to freely confess and freely pray for each other so that we may find the healing we need. In Jesus’ name I pray. ~ Stormie Omartian, #NFDB
899:The Owl And The Lark
A grizzled owl at midnight moped
Where thick the ivy glistened;
So I, who long have vainly groped
For wisdom, leaned and listened.
Its perch was firm, its aspect staid,
Its big eyes gleamed and brightened;
Now, now at last, will doubt be laid,
Now yearning be enlightened.
``Tu-whit! Tu-whoo!'' the bird discoursed,
``Tu-whoo! Tu-whit!'' repeated:
Showing how matter was, when forced
Through space, condensed and heated;
How rent, but spinning still, 'twas sphered
In star, and orb, and planet,
Where, as it cooled, live germs appeared
In lias, sand, and granite:
And, last, since nothing 'neath the sun
Avoids material tether,
How life must end, when once begun,
In scale, and hoof, and feather.
Then, flapping from the ivy-tod,
It slouched around the gable,
And, perching there, discussed if God
Be God, or but a fable.
In pompous scales Free Will and Fate
Were placed, and poised, and dangled,
And riddles small from riddles great
Expertly disentangled.
It drew betwixt ``Tu-whit,'' ``Tu-whoo,''
Distinctions nice and nicer:
The bird was very wise, I knew,
But I grew no whit wiser.
531
Then, letting metaphysics slip,
It mumbled moral thunder;
Showing how Virtue's self will trip
If Reason chance to blunder.
Its pleated wings adown its breast
Were like a surplice folded;
And, if the truth must be confessed,
It threatened me and scolded.
I thought the lecture somewhat long,
Impatient for its ending;
When, sudden, came a burst of song!
It was the lark ascending.
Dew gleamed in many a jewelled cup,
The air was bright and gracious;
And away the wings and the song went up,
Up through the ether spacious.
They bubbled, rippled, up the dome,
In sprays of silvery trilling;
Like endless fountain's lyric foam,
Still falling, still refilling.
And when I could no more descry
The bird, I still could hear it;
For sight, but not for soul, too high,
Unseen but certain Spirit.
All that the perched owl's puckered brow
Had vainly bid me ponder,
The lark's light wings were solving now
In the roofless dome up yonder.
Then brief as lightning-flash,-no more,I passed beyond the Finite;
And, borne past Heaven's wide-open door,
Saw everything within it.
Slow showering down from cloudless sphere,
532
The wanderer Elysian
Dropped nearer, clearer, to the ear,
Then back into the vision.
On his own song he seemed to swim;
Diving through song, descended:
Since I had been to Heaven with him,
Earth now was apprehended.
O souls perplexed by hood and cowl,
Fain would you find a teacher,
Consult the lark and not the owl,
The poet, not the preacher.
While brains mechanic vainly weave
The web and woof of thinking,
Go, mount up with the lark, and leave
The bird of wisdom blinking.
~ Alfred Austin,#NFDB
900:and drew her strength directly from our magickal Oklahoma earth. “U-we-tsi-a-ge-ya, it seems I need help at the lavender booth. I simply cannot believe how busy we are.” Grandma had barely spoken when a nun hurried up. “Zoey, Sister Mary Angela could use your help filling out cat adoption forms.” “I’ll help you, Grandma Redbird,” Shaylin said. “I love the smell of lavender.” “Oh, honey, that would be so sweet of you. First, could you run to my car and get into the trunk. There is another box of lavender soaps and sachets tucked back there. Looks like I’m going to sell out completely,” Grandma said happily. “Sure thing.” Shaylin caught the keys Grandma tossed to her and hurried toward the main exit of the school grounds which led to the parking lot, as well as the tree-lined road that joined Utica Street. “And I’ll call my momma. She said just let her know if we get too busy over here. She and the PTA moms will be back here in a sec,” said Stevie Rae. “Grandma, do you mind if I give Street Cats a hand? I’ve been dying to check out their new litter of kittens.” “Go on, u-we-tsi-a-ge-ya. I think Sister Mary Angela has been missing your company.” “Thanks, Grandma.” I smiled at her. Then I turned to Stevie Rae. “Okay, if your mom’s group is coming back, I’m gonna go help the nuns.” “Yeah, no problem.” Stevie Rae, shielding her eyes and peering through the crowd, added, “I see her now, and she’s got Mrs. Rowland and Mrs. Wilson with her.” “Don’t worry. We can handle this,” Shaunee said. “’Kay,” I said, grinning at both of them. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I left the cookie booth and noticed Aphrodite, clutching her big purple Queenies cup, was right on my heels. “I thought you didn’t want a lecture from the nuns.” “Better than a lecture from PTA moms.” She shuddered. “Plus, I like cats more than people.” I shrugged. “Okay, whatever.” We’d only gotten partway to the Street Cats tent when Aphrodite slowed way down. “Seriously. Effing. Pathetic.” She was muttering around her straw, narrowing her eyes, and glaring. I followed her gaze and joined her frown. “Yeah, no matter how many times I see them together, I still don’t get it.” Aphrodite and I had stopped to watch Shaunee’s ex-Twin BFF, Erin, hang all over Dallas. “I really thought she was better than that.” “Apparently not,” Aphrodite said. “Eeew,” I said, looking away from their way too public display of locked lips. “I’m telling you, there’s not enough booze in Tulsa to make watching those two suck face okay.” She made a gagging sound, which changed to a snort and a laugh. “Check out the wimple, twelve o’clock.” Sure enough, there was a nun I vaguely recognized as Sister Emily (one of the more uptight of the nuns) descending on the too-busy-with-their-tongues-to-notice couple. “She looks serious,” I said. “You know, a nun may very well be the direct opposite of an aphrodisiac. This should be entertaining. Let’s watch.” “Zoey! Over here!” I looked from the train wreck about to happen to see Sister Mary Angela waving me over to her. ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
901:before he went back to helping the boy. Missing from the Warrior tent were Kalona and Aurox. For obvious reasons, Thanatos had decided the Tulsa community wasn’t ready to meet either of them. I agreed with her. I wasn’t ready for … I mentally shook myself. No, I wasn’t going to think about the Aurox/Heath situation now. Instead I turned my attention to the second of the big tents. Lenobia was there, keeping a sharp eye on the people who clustered like buzzing bees around Mujaji and the big Percheron mare, Bonnie. Travis was with her. Travis was always with her, which made my heart feel good. It was awesome to see Lenobia in love. The Horse Mistress was like a bright, shining beacon of joy, and with all the Darkness I’d seen lately, that was rain in my desert. “Oh, for shit’s sake, where did I put my wine? Has anyone seen my Queenies cup? As the bumpkin reminded me, my parents are here somewhere, and I’m going to need fortification by the time they circle around and find me.” Aphrodite was muttering and pawing through the boxes of unsold cookies, searching for the big purple plastic cup I’d seen her drinking from earlier. “You have wine in that Queenies to go cup?” Stevie Rae was shaking her head at Aphrodite. “And you’ve been drinkin’ it through a straw?” Shaunee joined Stevie Rae in a head shake. “Isn’t that nasty?” “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Aphrodite quipped. “There are too many nuns lurking around to drink openly without hearing a boring lecture.” Aphrodite cut her eyes to the right of us where Street Cats had set up a half-moon display of cages filled with adoptable cats and bins of catnip-filled toys for sale. The Street Cats had their own miniature version of the silver and white tents, and I could see Damien sitting inside busily handling the cash register, but except for him, running every aspect of the feline area were the habit-wearing Benedictine nuns who had made Street Cats their own. One of the nuns looked my way and I waved and grinned at the Abbess. Sister Mary Angela waved back before returning to the conversation she was having with a family who were obviously falling in love with a cute white cat that looked like a giant cottonball. “Aphrodite, the nuns are cool,” I reminded her. “And they look too busy to pay any attention to you,” Stevie Rae said. “Imagine that—you may not be the center of everyone’s attention,” Shaylin said with mock surprise. Stevie Rae covered her giggle with a cough. Before Aphrodite could say something hateful, Grandma limped up to us. Other than the limp and being pale, Grandma looked healthy and happy. It had only been a little over a week since Neferet had kidnapped and tried to kill her, but she’d recovered with amazing quickness. Thanatos had told us that was because she was in unusually good shape for a woman of her age. I knew it was because of something else—something we both shared—a special bond with a goddess who believed in giving her children free choice, along with gifting them with special abilities. Grandma was beloved of the Great Mother, ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
902:I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.
You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough.
But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.
The End ~ William James,#NFDB
903:A week is a long time to go without bedding someone?” Marcus interrupted, one brow arching.
“Are you going to claim that it’s not?”
“St. Vincent, if a man has time to bed a woman more than once a week, he clearly doesn’t have enough to do. There are any number of responsibilities that should keep you sufficiently occupied in lieu of…” Marcus paused, considering the exact phrase he wanted. “Sexual congress.” A pronounced silence greeted his words. Glancing at Shaw, Marcus noticed his brother-in-law’s sudden preoccupation with knocking just the right amount of ash from his cigar into a crystal dish, and he frowned. “You’re a busy man, Shaw, with business concerns on two continents. Obviously you agree with my statement.”
Shaw smiled slightly. “My lord, since my ‘sexual congress’ is limited exclusively to my wife, who happens to be your sister, I believe I’ll have the good sense to keep my mouth shut.”
St. Vincent smiled lazily. “It’s a shame for a thing like good sense to get in the way of an interesting conversation.” His gaze switched to Simon Hunt, who wore a slight frown. “Hunt, you may as well render your opinion. How often should a man make love to a woman? Is more than once a week a case for unpardonable gluttony?”
Hunt threw Marcus a vaguely apologetic glance. “Much as I hesitate to agree with St. Vincent…”
Marcus scowled as he insisted, “It is a well-known fact that sexual over-indulgence is bad for the health, just as with excessive eating and drinking—”
“You’ve just described my perfect evening, Westcliff,” St. Vincent murmured with a grin, and returned his attention to Hunt. “How often do you and your wife—”
“The goings-on in my bedroom are not open for discussion,” Hunt said firmly.
“But you lie with her more than once a week?” St. Vincent pressed.
“Hell, yes,” Hunt muttered.
“And well you should, with a woman as beautiful as Mrs. Hunt,” St. Vincent said smoothly, and laughed at the warning glance that Hunt flashed him. “Oh, don’t glower—your wife is the last woman on earth whom I would have any designs on. I have no desire to be pummeled to a fare-thee-well beneath the weight of your ham-sized fists. And happily married women have never held any appeal for me—not when unhappily married ones are so much easier.” He looked back at Marcus. “It seems that you are alone in your opinion, Westcliff. The values of hard work and self-discipline are no match for a warm female body in one’s bed.”
Marcus frowned. “There are more important things.”
“Such as?” St. Vincent inquired with the exaggerated patience of a rebellious lad being subjected to an unwanted lecture from his decrepit grandfather. “I suppose you’ll say something like ‘social progress’? Tell me, Westcliff…” His gaze turned sly. “If the devil proposed a bargain to you that all the starving orphans in England would be well-fed from now on, but in return you would never be able to lie with a woman again, which would you choose? The orphans, or your own gratification?”
“I never answer hypothetical questions.”
St. Vincent laughed. “As I thought. Bad luck for the orphans, it seems. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
904:He had a rough idea where he was going, since Rylann had previously mentioned that she lived in Roscoe Village. At the stoplight at Belmont Avenue, he pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts. The beauty of text messaging, he realized, was in its simplicity. He didn’t have to try to explain things, nor did he have to attempt to parse through all the banter in an attempt to figure out what she might be thinking. Instead, he could keep things short and sweet.
I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU.
He hit send.
To kill time while he waited for her response, he drove in the direction of his sister’s wine shop, figuring he could always drop in and harass Jordan about something.
This time, however, she beat him to the punch.
“So who’s the brunette bombshell?” Jordan asked as soon as he walked into the shop and took a seat at the main bar.
Damn. He’d forgotten about the stupid Scene and Heard column. Kyle helped himself to a cracker and some Brie cheese sitting on the bar. “I’m going to say…Angelina Jolie. Actually, no—Megan Fox.”
“Megan Fox is, like, twenty-five.”
“And this is a problem why, exactly?”
Jordan slapped his hand as he reached for more crackers. “Those are for customers.” She put her hand on her hip. “You know, after reading the Scene and Heard column, I’d kind of hoped it was Rylann they were talking about. And that maybe, just maybe, my ne’er-do-well twin had decided to stop playing around and finally pursue a woman of quality.”
He stole another cracker. “Now, that would be something.”
She shook her head. “Why do I bother? You know, one day you’re going to wake up and…”
Kyle’s cell phone buzzed, and he tuned out the rest of Jordan’s lecture—he could probably repeat the whole thing word for word by now—as he checked the incoming message. It was from Rylann, her response as short and sweet as his original text.
3418 CORNELIA, #3.
He had her address.
With a smile, he looked up and interrupted his sister. “That’s great, Jordo. Hey, by any chance do you have any bottles of that India Ink cabernet lying around?”
She stopped midrant and stared at him. “I’m sure I do. Why, what made you think of that?” Then her face broke into a wide grin. “Wait a second…that was the wine Rylann talked about when she was here. She said it was one of her favorites.”
“Did she? Funny coincidence.”
Jordan put her hand over her heart. “Oh my God, you’re trying to impress her. That is so cute.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyle scoffed. “I just thought, since I’ve heard such good things about the wine, that I would give it a shot.”
Jordan gave him a look, cutting through all the bullshit. “Kyle. She’s going to love it.”
Okay, whatever. Maybe he was trying to impress Rylann a little. “You don’t think it’s too much? Like I’m trying too hard?”
Jordan put her hand over her heart again. “Oh. It’s like watching Bambi take his first steps.”
“Jordo…” he growled warningly.
With a smile, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “It’s perfect. Trust me. ~ Julie James,#NFDB
905:Last month, on a very windy day, I was returning from a lecture I had given to a group in Fort Washington. I was beginning to feel unwell. I was feeling increasing spasms in my legs and back and became anxious as I anticipated a difficult ride back to my office. Making matters worse, I knew I had to travel two of the most treacherous high-speed roads near Philadelphia – the four-lane Schuylkill Expressway and the six-lane Blue Route.
You’ve been in my van, so you know how it’s been outfitted with everything I need to drive. But you probably don’t realize that I often drive more slowly than other people. That’s because I have difficulty with body control. I’m especially careful on windy days when the van can be buffeted by sudden gusts. And if I’m having problems with spasms or high blood pressure, I stay way over in the right hand lane and drive well below the speed limit.
When I’m driving slowly, people behind me tend to get impatient. They speed up to my car, blow their horns, drive by, stare at me angrily, and show me how long their fingers can get. (I don't understand why some people are so proud of the length of their fingers, but there are many things I don't understand.) Those angry drivers add stress to what already is a stressful experience of driving.
On this particular day, I was driving by myself. At first, I drove slowly along back roads. Whenever someone approached, I pulled over and let them pass. But as I neared the Blue Route, I became more frightened. I knew I would be hearing a lot of horns and seeing a lot of those long fingers.
And then I did something I had never done in the twenty-four years that I have been driving my van. I decided to put on my flashers. I drove the Blue Route and the Schuylkyll Expressway at 35 miles per hour.
Now…Guess what happened?
Nothing! No horns and no fingers.
But why?
When I put on my flashers, I was saying to the other drivers, “I have a problem here – I am vulnerable and doing the best I can.” And everyone understood. Several times, in my rearview mirror I saw drivers who wanted to pass. They couldn’t get around me because of the stream of passing traffic. But instead of honking or tailgating, they waited for the other cars to pass, knowing the driver in front of them was in some way weak.
Sam, there is something about vulnerability that elicits compassion. It is in our hard wiring. I see it every day when people help me by holding doors, pouring cream in my coffee, or assist me when I put on my coat. Sometimes I feel sad because from my wheelchair perspective, I see the best in people. But those who appear strong and invulnerably typically are not exposed to the kindness I see daily.
Sometimes situations call for us to act strong and brave even when we don't feel that way. But those are a few and far between. More often, there is a better pay-off if you don't pretend you feel strong when you feel weak, or pretend that you are brave when you’re scared. I really believe the world might be a safer place if everyone who felt vulnerable wore flashers that said, “I have a problem and I’m doing the best I can. Please be patient! ~ Daniel Gottlieb,#NFDB
906:Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders.
But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices.
Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.
Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. IF THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE, THEY WILL BE TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED. ~ William James,#NFDB
907:Besides, if you wouldn’t duel with Lord Everly when he called you a cheat, you certainly wouldn’t harm poor Lord Howard merely for touching my arm.”
“Wouldn’t I?” he asked softly. “Those are two very different issues.”
Not for the first time, Elizabeth found herself at a loss to understand him. Suddenly his presence was vaguely threatening again; whenever he stopped playing the amusing gallant he became a dark, mysterious stranger. Raking her hair off her forehead, she glanced out the window. “It must be after three already. I really must leave.” She surged to her feet, smoothing her skirts. “Thank you for a lovely afternoon. I don’t know why I remained. I shouldn’t have, but I am glad I did…”
She ran out of words and watched in wary alarm as he stood up. “Don’t you?” he asked softly.
“Don’t I what?”
“Know why you’re still here with me?”
“I don’t even know who you are?” she cried. “I know about places you’ve been, but not your family, your people. I know you gamble great sums of money at cards, and I disapprove of that-“
“I also gamble great sums of money on ships and cargo-will that improve my character in your eyes?”
“And I know,” she continued desperately, watching his gaze turn warm and sensual, “I absolutely know you make me excessively uneasy when you look at me the way you’re doing now!”
“Elizabeth,” he said in a tone of tender finality, “you’re here because we’re already half in love with each other.”
“Whaaat? she gasped.
“And as to needing to know who I am, that’s very simple to answer.” His hand lifted, grazing her pale cheek, then smoothing backward, cupping her head. Gently he explained, “I am the man you’re going to marry.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I think it’s too late to start praying,” he teased huskily.
“You-you must be mad,” she said, her voice quavering.
“My thoughts exactly,” he whispered, and, bending his head, he pressed his lips to her forehead, drawing her against his chest, holding her as if he knew she would struggle if he tried to do more than that. “You were not in my plans, Miss Cameron.”
“Oh, please,” Elizabeth implored helplessly, “don’t do this to me. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what you want.”
“I want you.” He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifted it, forcing her to meet his steady gaze as he quietly added, “And you want me.”
Elizabeth’s entire body started to tremble as his lips began descending to hers, and she sought to forestall what her heart knew was inevitable by reasoning with him. “A gently bred Englishwomen,” she shakily quoted Lucinda’s lecture, “feels nothing stronger than affection. We do not fall in love.”
His warm lips covered hers. “I’m a Scot,” he murmured huskily. “We do.”
“A Scot!” she uttered when he lifted his mouth from hers.
He laughed at her appalled expression. “I said ‘Scot,’ not ‘ax murderer.”
A Scot who was a gambler to boot! Havenhurst would land on the auction block, the servants turned off, and the world would fall apart. “I cannot, cannot marry you.”
“Yes, Elizabeth,” he whispered as his lips trailed a hot path over her cheek to her ear, “you can. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
908:Coup D'Etat
I’m comfortable with your confronting me
hurling, albeit politely, the epic query
haunting your ‘tolerance’ and a fever
to my soul. It’s frankly a relief
decoding the cryptic cause of my exile
in the context of considering your phobia. So
here, the facts: boys of my generation
marching in front of our tanks to eat into
the landmines. Women not unlike my mother
buried neck-deep for transgression
before having their heads smashed with rocks.
Your tongue has already tried obfuscations
avoiding the ‘sensitive’ appellation; I put
our minds at (some) ease by offering the term
‘Muslim’, and using direct monosyllables
to terminate the confluence of innuendo:
“What went wrong?” I briefly catalogue
the points of my suppressed pride: Persian
poets, those geniuses; Islamic civilisation
an absolute paragon of the Middle Ages. ‘We’
achieved so much: algebra, alchemy, Alhambra
Aviccena, Omar Khayam, Rumi and Andalusia
and now beheaded journalists, banished feminists
persecuted writers and pulverised regimes. What
did go wrong? You don’t require my noting
British divide-and-conquer, Russian missiles
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US uranium-depleted and cluster bombs; and let’s
please avoid Israel. So I propose a date: 19 August
1953; and the place, Tehran. The event
the calculated abortion of the incipient democracy
of my native land. You know about
the coup that crushed our future, engineered
by the CIA with the mullahs’ collusion
and our king’s utter complicity? You’re right
dismissing my narration as apologia
for a nation’s impotence. Why didn’t my
grandparents oppose the US-backed generals
in the streets of Tehran on the day our chosen
Prime Minister Mosaddegh was toppled? Where
were our prodigious poets and philosophers
when Eisenhower’s operatives signalled
to venal clerics and commanded the junta? Here,
more facts: hurt by the grotesque perfidy
Iranians of my parents’ generation mounted
a Revolution against the coup’s beneficiary
the Shah; then the Islamic Republic; Sharia law; war
with the US protégé Saddam; and now
terrorism, terror against terrorism, and the terrors
of a nuclear war between Iran and, yes, Israel. You
find my discourse cogent yet, or predictably
tendentious? A history lecture in need of
an addendum of objectivity? You’ve finally
terminated the small talk, tightened
your grimace. I repeat my own morose
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volition to locate an answer. Yes, we will
otherwise be prey to perennial fears and
contemporaneous wars. What went wrong
with noble hopes, ‘religion of peace’ and all
the bridge-building and culture-crossing?
The soulfulness of Sufi poets and the magic
of Scheherazade’s stories. I feel your
disappointment. A romantic quest narrative
crusading knights vs. ardent Saracens
instead of Cold War intrigue and Third World
servitude. I grant something went wrong
all those years ago, and continues to afflict.
Things will keep going wrong. But what would I
know. I’m only traumatised and feverish
by the event’s effects, forced into perpetual
exile. I’ve only survived. What do you think?
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
909:The lord of the house is not at home, Your Majesty,” she informed me. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I actually came to see Lord Steldor, if you would escort me to his room.”
Now she seemed intrigued, for the reasons behind the annulment of my marriage to the former King had been kept quiet. I could read on her face her desire to eavesdrop.
“Certainly, although I don’t know if His Majesty has risen.”
“He has,” I said without thought. Not once during our marriage had I woken before him, and I doubted his sleep patterns had changed.
With a puzzled glance, she led me up the stairs and into a hallway, stopping before the second door. She knocked on my behalf, and gave another small curtsey when Steldor’s voice invited entry.
I opened the door, waiting for her to return to the first floor before entering, catching her regretful glance that she could not dally. Steldor was sitting up on the bed across the room, his legs swung over the side, pulling a shirt carefully over his head.
“Should you be doing that so soon?” I asked, for it had only been a week since the lashing.
The garment fell over his muscular chest, and he ran a hand through his dark hair. He came to his feet with the hint of a wince.
“Making sure I’m cared for is no longer your worry. I’m not certain it ever was.”
His mood was a bit dark, and I wondered if I should have given him more time to recover before paying him this visit.
“Perhaps what you need is someone to keep you from coming to harm in the first place.”
He smirked, turning his back to me to idly straighten his bed coverings. “What is it--did you come here to coddle me or lecture me?”
“Both, I suppose.” I was frowning, amazed at how swiftly we had fallen into our old patterns. “I’ve come to talk--and to give you this.”
He swiveled to face me as I removed his silver wolf’s head talisman from the pocket of my cloak.
“I never expected to see that again,” he said, sounding awed. “Did you face the bitch yourself or get it from Narian?”
I smiled at his word choice. “I approached Rava myself--I’ve been known to face down a bitch or two.” He stepped forward to take the pendant from my hand and immediately slipped the chain over his head.
“Thank you. I feel better already.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what is the significance of the talisman? When I reclaimed it from Rava, she remarked that it might provide power and protection, and that started me thinking about its purpose.”
He chuckled ruefully. “I hate to admit it, but Rava’s right. The wolf brings strength and protection. Depending on the mix of herbs and flowers put inside the talisman, other properties can be added, such as health and healing. The captain gave the pendant to me when I was four, following the death of Terek, at the time I was sent to live with Baelic and Lania. He didn’t want me to think he’d abandoned me or that I was in danger. It was originally his, and his father’s before him. I’ve worn it ever since.”
“Then I’m very glad I was able to secure its return.”
His eyes met mine, and the color rose in my cheeks, for I was still affected to some degree by his handsome features and soldier’s build.
“I suppose that concludes the coddling,” he finally said, crossing his arms and watching me expectantly.
“Yes, I suppose it does. ~ Cayla Kluver,#NFDB
910:Sans doute, l’amitié, l’amitié qui a égard aux individus, est une chose frivole, et la lecture est une amitié. Mais du moins c’est une amitié sincère, et le fait qu’elle s’adresse à un mort, à un absent, lui donne quelque chose de désintéressé, de presque touchant. C’est de plus une amitié débarrassée de tout ce qui fait la laideur des autres.
Comme nous ne sommes tous, nous les vivants, que des morts qui ne sont pas encore entrés en fonctions, toutes ces politesses, toutes ces salutations dans le vestibule que nous appelons déférence, gratitude, dévouement et où nous mêlons tant de mensonges, sont stériles et fatigantes. De plus, – dès les premières relations de sympathie, d’admiration, de reconnaissance, – les premières paroles que nous prononçons, les premières lettres que nous écrivons, tissent autour de nous les premiers fils d’une toile d’habitudes, d’une véritable manière d’être, dont nous ne pouvons plus nous débarrasser dans les amitiés suivantes ; sans compter que pendant ce temps-là les paroles excessives que nous avons prononcées restent comme des lettres de change que nous devons payer, ou que nous paierons plus cher encore toute notre vie des remords de les avoir laissé protester.
Dans la lecture, l’amitié est soudain ramenée à sa pureté première. Avec les livres, pas d’amabilité. Ces amis-là, si nous passons la soirée avec eux, c’est vraiment que nous en avons envie. Eux, du moins, nous ne les quittons souvent qu’à regret. Et quand nous les avons quittés, aucune de ces pensées qui gâtent l’amitié : Qu’ont-ils pensé de nous ? – N’avons-nous pas manqué de tact ? – Avons-nous plu ? – et la peur d’être oublié pour tel autre.
Toutes ces agitations de l’amitié expirent au seuil de cette amitié pure et calme qu’est la lecture. Pas de déférence non plus ; nous ne rions de ce que dit Molière que dans la mesure exacte où nous le trouvons drôle ; quand il nous ennuie nous n’avons pas peur d’avoir l’air ennuyé, et quand nous avons décidément assez d’être avec lui, nous le remettons à sa place aussi brusquement que s’il n’avait ni génie ni célébrité.
L’atmosphère de cette pure amitié est le silence, plus pur que la parole. Car nous parlons pour les autres, mais nous nous taisons pour nous-mêmes. Aussi le silence ne porte pas, comme la parole, la trace de nos défauts, de nos grimaces. Il est pur, il est vraiment une atmosphère. Entre la pensée de l’auteur et la nôtre il n’interpose pas ces éléments irréductibles, réfractaires à la pensée, de nos égoïsmes différents.
Le langage même du livre est pur (si le livre mérite ce nom), rendu transparent par la pensée de l’auteur qui en a retiré tout ce qui n’était pas elle-même jusqu’à le rendre son image fidèle, chaque phrase, au fond, ressemblant aux autres, car toutes sont dites par l’inflexion unique d’une personnalité ; de là une sorte de continuité, que les rapports de la vie et ce qu’ils mêlent à la pensée d’éléments qui lui sont étrangers excluent et qui permet très vite de suivre la ligne même de la pensée de l’auteur, les traits de sa physionomie qui se reflètent dans ce calme miroir. Nous savons nous plaire tour à tour aux traits de chacun sans avoir besoin qu’ils soient admirables, car c’est un grand plaisir pour l’esprit de distinguer ces peintures profondes et d’aimer d’une amitié sans égoïsme, sans phrases, comme en soi-même. ~ Marcel Proust,#NFDB
911:Aunt Dorothy's Lecture
Come, go and practise—get your work—
Do something, Nelly, pray.
I hate to see you moon about
In this uncertain way!
Why do you look so vacant, child?
I fear you must be ill.
Surely you are not thinking of
That Captain Cameron still?
Ah, yes—I fear'd so! You may blush;
I blush for you, my dear;
And it is scarce a week ago
Since Gerald brought him here—
The day he fell in the hunting-field,
And his pretty horse was lamed.
O child—and with your bringing up!
You ought to be ashamed.
Last night I saw you watching him,
And you danced with him thrice;
You turn'd quite red when he spoke to you—
Such manners are not nice.
You, Nelly Gray, should not be seen
(I don't wish to be harsh)
Running wild, like the servant-girls,
For a red coat and moustache.
Not that he isn't a gentleman
From spur to shako-brim—
I know good blood when I see it—yes,
I will say that for him.
He does not swagger, nor lisp, nor flirt—
Has none of those vulgar ways;
And he does not talk like a stable-boy,
As the fashion is nowadays.
In fact, I admire him very much—
My dear, you need not fret—
I do; he's very different from
The rest of Gerald's set.
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He's very handsome, certainly—
I don't mind saying so.
He reminds me a bit of your uncle, when
I met him long ago.
He had a silky, long moustache
Of just that golden shade;
And broad Greek brows, with a tint of bronze,
That Indian suns had made.
He was a soldier, too, you know—
As big and strong and tall:
He'd just come home when I saw him first
At Lady Talbot's ball.
I remember when we were introduced;
By stealth I look'd him o'er—
Such haughty, indolent, gentle eyes,
I never saw before!
I felt so strange when he look'd at me;
I cannot tell you why—
But I seem'd to feel he was mine, to keep
And love, till I should die.
'Twas very odd—in a moment, too,
Before I knew his name!
But, Nelly—O how the world was changed
And brighten'd, when he came!
I was so restless all that night;—
I did not want to see,
I felt where he moved about the room
While he was away from me.
I was jealous—I could not help it,
Although I struggled hard—
Of the other girls, whose favour'd names
Were written on his card;
They were so rich, and I was poor;
They were so grandly dress'd,
And I so dowdy; and yet, and yet,
I thought he liked me best.
The last long hour he danced with them,
And oh I miss'd him so!
And then I heard our carriage call'd,
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And I knew that I must go.
A big lump rose up in my throat
That I could hardly bear;
But, passing through the vestibule,
I saw him standing there.
I knew not where he came from,
But I felt no surprise
When he look'd down from his stately height
With his grave and quiet eyes,
And held his hand for a mute good-night
That said all words could say;—
Ah, love! he made me happy then
For ever and for aye.
Well, well,—but this is nonsense;
How I am running on!—
His golden hair grew thin and grey,
And now he's dead and gone.
There, go and dress for dinner, child;
It's getting late, you see;
And—perhaps I'll ask young Cameron
If he'll come in to tea.
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
912:I needed to grab another box of screws, but, when I got to the truck, I realized I’d left my wallet in my tool bucket. When I went back ground the house to get it, she had my plans open and was double-checking all my measurements.”
Emma’s cheeks burned when Gram laughed at Sean’s story, but, since she couldn’t deny it, she stuck her last bite of the fabulous steak he’d grilled into her mouth.
“That’s my Emma,” Gram said. “I think her first words were ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’”
“In my defense,” she said when she’d swallowed, pointing her fork at Sean for emphasis, “my name is on the truck, and being able to pound nails doesn’t make you a builder. I have a responsibility to my clients to make sure they get quality work.”
“I do quality work.”
“I know you build a quality deck, but stairs are tricky.” She smiled sweetly at him. “I had to double-check.”
“It’s all done but the seating now and it’s good work, even though I practically had to duct tape you to a tree in order to work in peace.”
She might have taken offense at his words if not for the fact he was playing footsie with her under the table. And when he nudged her foot to get her to look at him, he winked in that way that—along with the grin—made it almost impossible for her to be mad at him.
“It’s Sean’s turn to wash tonight. Emma, you dry and I’ll put away.”
“I’ll wash, Gram. Sean can dry.”
“I can wash,” Sean told her. “The world won’t come to an end if I wash the silverware before the cups.”
“It makes me twitch.”
“I know it does. That’s why I do it.” He leaned over and kissed her before she could protest.
“That new undercover-cop show I like is on tonight,” Gram said as they cleared the table. “Maybe Sean won’t snort his way through this episode.”
He laughed and started filling the sink with hot, soapy water. “I’m sorry, but if he keeps shoving his gun in his waistband like that, he’s going to shoot his…he’s going to shoot himself in a place men don’t want to be shot.”
Emma watched him dump the plates and silverware into the water—while three coffee mugs sat on the counter waiting to be washed—but forced herself to ignore it. “Can’t be worse than the movie the other night.”
“That was just stupid,” Sean said while Gram laughed.
They’d tried to watch a military-action movie and by the time they were fifteen minutes in, she thought they were going to have to medicate Sean if they wanted to see the end. After a particularly heated lecture about what helicopters could and couldn’t do, Emma had hushed him, but he’d still snorted so often in derision she was surprised he hadn’t done permanent damage to his sinuses.
“I don’t want you to think that’s real life,” he told them.
“I promise,” Gram said, “if I ever want to use a tank to break somebody out of a federal prison, I’ll ask you how to do it correctly first.”
Sean kissed the top of her head. “Thanks, Cat. At least you appreciate me, unlike Emma, who just tells me to shut up.”
“I’d appreciate you more if there wasn’t salad dressing floating in the dishwater you’re about to wash my coffee cup in.”
“According to the official guy’s handbook, if I keep doing it wrong, you’re supposed to let me watch SportsCenter while you do it yourself.”
“Did the official guy’s handbook also tell you that if that happens, you’ll also be free to watch the late-night sports show while I do other things myself? ~ Shannon Stacey,#NFDB
913:You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.
If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....
It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took.
And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things.
They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums.
Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me.
If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.
So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams. ~ Alice Sebold,#NFDB
914:What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…
Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.
I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.
I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below.
I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon.
History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.
'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow.
It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple.
I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.'
He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.'
'What?'
He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said.
'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.'
Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him.
'That information is classified, I'm afraid.'
1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.
'Is it open to the public?' I said.
'Not generally, no.'
I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.
'Are you happy here?' I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said.
'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'
St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.
'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.'
He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall. ~ Donna Tartt,#NFDB
915:You do that a great deal, don’t you?”
He swallowed the rest of his wine. “What?”
“Close up into yourself whenever someone tries to peer into your soul. Make a joke of it.”
“If you came out here to lecture me,” he snapped, “don’t bother. Gran has perfected that talent. You can’t possibly compete.”
“I only want to understand.”
“I want to be consumed by a star, but we don’t all get what we want.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Turning for the nearest door into the house, he started to stalk off, but she caught his arm.
“Why are you so angry at your grandmother?” Maria asked.
“I told you-she’s trying to ruin the lives of me and my siblings.”
“By requiring you to marry so you can have children? I thought all lords and ladies were expected to do that. And the five of you are certainly old enough.” Her tone turned teasing. “Some of you are beyond being old enough.”
“Watch it, minx,” he clipped out. “I’m not in the mood for having my nose tweaked tonight.”
“Because of your grandmother, you mean. It’s not just her demand that has you angry, is it? It goes back longer than that.”
Oliver glared at her. “Why do you care? Has she got you fighting her battles for her now?”
“Hardly. She just informed me that I was, and I quote, ‘exactly the sort of woman who would not meet my requirements of a wife.’”
A smile touched his lips at her accurate mimicking of Gran at her most haughty. “I told you she would think that.”
“Yes,” she said dryly. “You both excel at insulting people.”
“One of my many talents.”
“There you go again. Making a joke to avoid talking about what makes you uncomfortable.”
“And what is that?”
“What did your grandmother do, besides giving you an ultimatum about marriage, that has you at daggers drawn?”
Blast it all, would she not leave off? “How do you know she did anything? Perhaps I’m just contrary.”
“You are. But that’s not what has you so angry at her.”
“If you plan to spend the next two weeks asking ridiculous questions that have no answers, then I will pay you to return to London.”
She smiled. “No, you won’t. You need me.”
“True. But since I’m paying for the service you’re providing, I get some say in how it’s rendered. Bedeviling me with questions isn’t part of our bargain.”
“You haven’t paid me anything yet,” she said lightly, “so I should think there’s some leeway in the terms. Especially since I’ve been working hard all evening furthering your cause. I just finished telling your grandmother that I have ‘feelings’ for you, and that I know you have ‘feelings’ for me.”
“You didn’t choke on that lie?” he quipped.
“I do have feelings for you-probably not the sort she meant, though apparently she believed me. But she was suspicious. She’s more astute than you give her credit for. First she accused us of acting a farce, and then, when I denied that, she accused me of thinking to marry you so I could gain a fortune from her down the line.”
“And what did you say to that?”
“I told her she could keep her precious fortune.”
“Did you, indeed? I would have given my right arm to see that.” Maria was proving to be an endless source of amazement. No one ever stood up to Gran-except this American chit, with her naïve beliefs in justice and right and morality.
It amazed him that she’d done it, considering how he’d treated her. No one, not even his siblings, had ever defended him with so little reason. It stirred something that had long lain dead inside him.
His conscience? No, that wasn’t dead; it was nonexistent. ~ Sabrina Jeffries,#NFDB
916:The true Mantra must come from within OR it must be given by a Guru
Nobody can give you the true mantra. It's not something that is given; it's something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being - then it has power, because it's not something that comes from outside, it's your very own cry.
I saw, in my case, that my mantra has the power of immortality; whatever happens, if it is uttered, it's the Supreme that has the upper hand, it's no longer the lower law. And the words are irrelevant, they may not have any meaning - to someone else, my mantra is meaningless, but to me it's full, packed with meaning. And effective, because it's my cry, the intense aspiration of my whole being.
A mantra given by a guru is only the power to realize the experience of the discoverer of the mantra. The power is automatically there, because the sound contains the experience. I saw that once in Paris, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didn't even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced "yoga" for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lecture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light.... I was probably the only one to notice it. I said to myself, "Well!" Then I didn't give it any more thought, I forgot about the story. But as it happened, the experience recurred in two or three different countries, with different people, and every time there was the sound OM, I would suddenly see the place fill with that same light. So I understood. That sound contains the vibration of thousands and thousands of years of spiritual aspiration - there is in it the entire aspiration of men towards the Supreme. And the power is automatically there, because the experience is there.
It's the same with my mantra. When I wanted to translate the end of my mantra, "Glory to You, O Lord," into Sanskrit, I asked for Nolini's help. He brought his Sanskrit translation, and when he read it to me, I immediately saw that the power was there - not because Nolini put his power into it (!), God knows he had no intention of "giving" me a mantra! But the power was there because my experience was there. We made a few adjustments and modifications, and that's the japa I do now - I do it all the time, while sleeping, while walking, while eating, while working, all the time.[[Mother later clarified: "'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't MY mantra, it's something I ADDED to it - my mantra is something else altogether, that's not it. When I say that my mantra has the power of immortality, I mean the other, the one I don't speak of! I have never given the words.... You see, at the end of my walk, a kind of enthusiasm rises, and with that enthusiasm, the 'Glory to You' came to me, but it's part of the prayer I had written in Prayers and Meditations: 'Glory to You, O Lord, all-triumphant Supreme' etc. (it's a long prayer). It came back suddenly, and as it came back spontaneously, I kept it. Moreover, when Sri Aurobindo read this prayer in Prayers and Meditations, he told me it was very strong. So I added this phrase as a kind of tail to my japa. But 'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't my spontaneous mantra - it came spontaneously, but it was something written very long ago. The two things are different."
And that's how a mantra has life: when it wells up all the time, spontaneously, like the cry of your being - there is no need of effort or concentration: it's your natural cry. Then it has full power, it is alive. It must well up from within.... No guru can give you that. ~ The Mother, Agenda, May 11 1963,#NFDB
917:Lieutenant Smith was asked by Mister Zumwald to get him a drink,” Wilkes said. “She responded with physical violence. I counseled her on conduct unbecoming of an officer and, when she reacted with foul language, on disrespect to a superior officer, sir, and I’ll stand by that position. Sir.”
“I agree that her actions were unbecoming, Captain,” Steve said, mildly. “She really should have resolved it with less force. Which I told her as well as a strong lecture on respect to a superior officer. On the other hand, Captain, Mister Zumwald physically accosted her, grabbing her arm and, when she protested, called her a bitch. Were you aware of that, Captain?”
“She did say something about it, sir,” Wilkes said. “However… ”
“I also understand that you spent some time with Mister Zumwald afterwards,” Steve said. “Rather late. Did you at any time express to Mister Zumwald that accosting any woman, much less an officer of… what was it? ‘The United States Naval services’ was unacceptable behavior, Captain?”
“Sir,” Wilkes said. “Mister Zumwald is a major Hollywood executive… ”
“Was,” Steve said.
“Excuse me, sir?” Wilkes said.
“Was a major Hollywood executive,” Steve said. “Right now, Ernest Zumwald, Captain, is a fucking refugee off a fucking lifeboat. Period fucking dot. He’s given a few days grace, like most refugees, to get his headspace and timing back, then he can decide if he wants to help out or go in with the sick, lame and lazy. And in this case he’s a fucking refugee who thinks it’s acceptable to accost some unknown chick and tell him to get him a fucking drink. Grab her by the arm and, when she tells him to let go, become verbally abusive.
“What makes the situation worse, Captain, is that the person he accosted was not just any passing young hotty but a Marine officer. He did not know that at the time; the Marine officer was dressed much like other women in the compartment. However, he does not have the right to grab any woman in my care by the fucking arm and order them to get him a fucking drink, Captain! Then, to make matters worse, following the incident, Captain, you spent the entire fucking evening getting drunk with a fucktard who had physically and verbally assaulted a female Marine officer! You dumbshit.”
“Sir, I… ” Wilkes said, paling.
“And not just any Marine officer, oh, no,” Steve said. “Forget that it was the daughter of the Acting LANTFLEET. Forget that it was the daughter of your fucking rating officer, you retard. I’m professional enough to overlook that. I really am. There’s personal and professional, and I do actually know the line. Except that it was, professionally, a disgraceful action on your part, Captain. But not just any Marine officer, Captain. No, this was a Marine officer that, unlike you, is fucking worshipped by your Marines, Captain. This is a Marine officer that the acting Commandant thinks only uses boats so her boots don’t get wet walking from ship to ship. This is a Marine officer who is the only fucking light in the darkness to the entire Squadron, you dumbfuck!
“I’d already gotten the scuttlebutt that you were a palace prince pogue who was a cowardly disgrace to the Marine uniform, Captain. I was willing to let that slide because maybe you could run the fucking clearance from the fucking door. But you just pissed off every fucking Marine we’ve got, you idiot. You incredible dumbfuck, moron!
“In case you hadn’t noticed, you are getting cold-shouldered by everyone you work with while you were brown-nosing some fucking useless POS who used to ‘be somebody.’ ‘Your’ Marines are spitting on your shadow and that includes your fucking Gunnery Sergeant! Captain, am I getting through to you? Are you even vaguely recognizing how badly you fucked up? Professionally, politically, personally? ~ John Ringo,#NFDB
918:Of course we do." Dresden's voice was cutting. "But you're thinking too small. Building humanity's greatest empire is like building the world's largest anthill. Insignificant. There is a civilization out there that built the protomolecule and hurled it at us over two billion years ago. They were already gods at that point. What have they become since then? With another two billion years to advance?"
With a growing dread, Holden listened to Dresden speak. This speech had the air of something spoken before. Perhaps many times. And it had worked. It had convinced powerful people. It was why Protogen had stealth ships from the Earth shipyards and seemingly limitless behind-the-scenes support.
"We have a terrifying amount of catching up to do, gentlemen," Dresden was saying. "But fortunately we have the tool of our enemy to use in doing it."
"Catching up?" a soldier to Holden's left said. Dresden nodded at the man and smiled.
"The protomolecule can alter the host organism at the molecular level; it can create genetic change on the fly. Not just DNA, but any stable replicatoR But it is only a machine. It doesn't think. It follows instructions. If we learn how to alter that programming, then we become the architects of that change."
Holden interrupted. "If it was supposed to wipe out life on Earth and replace it with whatever the protomolecule's creators wanted, why turn it loose?"
"Excellent question," Dresden said, holding up one finger like a college professor about to deliver a lecture. "The protomolecule doesn't come with a user's manual. In fact, we've never before been able to actually watch it carry out its program. The molecule requires significant mass before it develops enough processing power to fulfill its directives. Whatever they are."
Dresden pointed at the screens covered with data around them.
"We are going to watch it at work. See what it intends to do. How it goes about doing it. And, hopefully, learn how to change that program in the process."
"You could do that with a vat of bacteria," Holden said.
"I'm not interested in remaking bacteria," Dresden said.
"You're fucking insane," Amos said, and took another step toward Dresden. Holden put a hand on the big mechanic's shoulder.
"So," Holden said. "You figure out how the bug works, and then what?"
"Then everything. Belters who can work outside a ship without wearing a suit. Humans capable of sleeping for hundreds of years at a time flying colony ships to the stars. No longer being bound to the millions of years of evolution inside one atmosphere of pressure at one g, slaves to oxygen and water. We decide what we want to be, and we reprogram ourselves to be that. That's what the protomolecule gives us."
Dresden had stood back up as he'd delivered this speech, his face shining with the zeal of a prophet.
"What we are doing is the best and only hope of humanity's survival. When we go out there, we will be facing gods."
"And if we don't go out?" Fred asked. He sounded thoughtful.
"They've already fired a doomsday weapon at us once," Dresden said.
The room was silent for a moment. Holden felt his certainty slip. He hated everything about Dresden's argument, but he couldn't quite see his way past it. He knew in his bones that something about it was dead wrong, but he couldn't find the words. Naomi's voice startled him.
"Did it convince them?" she asked.
"Excuse me?" Dresden said.
"The scientists. The technicians. Everyone you needed to make it happen. They actually had to do this. They had to watch the video of people dying all over Eros. They had to design those radioactive murder chambers. So unless you managed to round up every serial killer in the solar system and send them through a postgraduate program, how did you do this?"
"We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints."
Half a dozen clues clicked into place in Holden's head. ~ James S A Corey, Leviathan Wakes,#NFDB
919:The Lecture Last Night
after Howard Dossor
Life is a travesty. I've endured
even worse. Used to be
a time when cognisance
had the better of me. When I believed
in the aura of authenticity
(if I hadn't had too much to drink.) Now
I'm a cog. Meetings and salary
, a healthy diet, recycling bins. Subjectivity
, frankly academic. I even laugh
at my boss's jokes. Used to be
the kid who renounced conformity
, no hope for love or popularity. Now
I'm a participant. Debates and discussions
, clean socks and gas heating. Essence
was certainly secondary to substance
abuse. Don't get me wrong; I despised
being. Truly. It wasn't purpose
I lacked. (I have it now & don't like it.) What
I missed was the vision (or wisdom?)
to perceive the voids of hedonism
; now that the spade is called a spade
all too often... I'm speechless. Contrivance
of the Symbolic surrounds me. Can't I curse
84
God again even if he doesn't exist
without a bad science? Can't one shoot
an oblivious Arab on the beach, for old
time's sake? I even compliment my aunt
on her cooking. I perve, obediently, on women
in advertisements. The normative
has consumed me. I've become a human.
ii
On the way to the lecture
I noticed the footpath widened
to accommodate two-way traffic
of effervescent teenage shoppers
in what was only six years ago
a spooky, rundown suburb. How
self-deception dissolves all
in its path of necessity. On the way
to the lecture on 'Existential Love'
one week night, waiting for the tram
I overheard a soft-spoken man
give directions for an authentic Thai
restaurant on his Blackberry; later
on the tram a mentally ill tramp
grumbled to himself about the bitch
who took his sandwich-maker. Is the jury
still out on religion or do we see it
as the license for a will to power? I see
people being what they want to be. Free
-dom, style, choice abound. On the way
85
to the monthly lecture of Melbourne's
Existentialist Society, I'm the autonomous
agent who chooses the singular, special
deal - half-priced donut with a coffee at the 7-11 opposite where I get off
the tram. An absurd dinner, indeed. I spill
jam on my jacket (I always do)
on the way to the church building
where the secretary of the Atheist Society
chairs tonight's lecture. Irony
isn't a mark of a true being. (or
is it?) Illusions, illusions. The lecture begins.
iii
But how do I account for this
love? So much oppression
I've seen and felt, can't undo the notion
of my/your integrity. If I can't sense you
at the level of vitality, won't we touch
as mere, sacred bodies? So much simulation
I've lived with, can't refute the passion
for the Real, shattering originality. Where
do I trace the tangible locus
of this love? So much consternation
I've been offered, can't oust sensation
of attachment, however transient. And why
do I need this love? So much sedation
by the opiates of religion, facts, information
can't turn me off Truth entirely. Love
86
has brought me into Being. Sexual, ineffable.
iv
After the lecture, I'm hungry
and have an overpriced felafel. Angry drunks
outside Smith Street Woolworths, gone
, supplanted by suave African tourists. Windows
of shops proclaim the glory of saving
money on wine glasses, hand-knitted scarves. I tend
to agree with Adorno apropos the jargon
of authenticity. Capitalism has made a killing
from our existential obsessions. I'm
an unnamed soldier. I march (with dread)
towards Monday morning, office computer
and ripples of status anxiety in the eyes
of battle-hardened colleagues. The tram
slithers past my old Northcote joint, a warren
actually. There I survived on alcohol
, dope, fantasy until love's insubstantiality
lured me to her proximity. Am I sufficiently
committed to my innateness? When
I get off the tram, darkness of the street
doesn't obscure the path to the small flat
where loved ones sleep. It was interesting
, the lecture last night, I'll tell her in the morning
before roaring, chasing Marco as a Velociraptor
and at work I'll maintain a sort of smile. I'll sense
the point of existence, the price of Being.
87
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
920:The Angel In The House. Book Ii. Canto Iv.
Preludes.
I Honour and Desert
O queen, awake to thy renown,
Require what 'tis our wealth to give,
And comprehend and wear the crown
Of thy despised prerogative!
I, who in manhood's name at length
With glad songs come to abdicate
The gross regality of strength,
Must yet in this thy praise abate,
That, through thine erring humbleness
And disregard of thy degree,
Mainly, has man been so much less
Than fits his fellowship with thee.
High thoughts had shaped the foolish brow,
The coward had grasp'd the hero's sword,
The vilest had been great, hadst thou,
Just to thyself, been worth's reward.
But lofty honours undersold
Seller and buyer both disgrace;
And favours that make folly bold
Banish the light from virtue's face.
II Love and Honour
What man with baseness so content,
Or sick with false conceit of right,
As not to know that the element
And inmost warmth of love's delight
Is honour? Who'd not rather kiss
A duchess than a milkmaid, prank
The two in equal grace, which is
Precedent Nature's obvious rank?
Much rather, then, a woman deck'd
With saintly honours, chaste and good,
Whose thoughts celestial things affect,
Whose eyes express her heavenly mood!
Those lesser vaunts are dimm'd or lost
139
Which plume her name or paint her lip,
Extinct in the deep-glowing boast
Of her angelic fellowship.
III Valour misdirected
‘I'll hunt for dangers North and South,
‘To prove my love, which sloth maligns!’
What seems to say her rosy mouth?
‘I'm not convinced by proofs but signs.’
Love In Idleness.
What should I do? In such a wife
Fortune had lavish'd all her store,
And nothing now seem'd left for life
But to deserve her more and more.
To this I vow'd my life's whole scope;
And Love said, ‘I forewarn you now,
‘The Maiden will fulfil your hope
‘Only as you fulfil your vow.’
II
A promised service, (task for days),
Was done this morning while she slept,
With that full heart which thinks no praise
Of vows which are not more than kept;
But loftier work did love impose,
And studious hours. Alas, for these,
While she from all my thoughts arose
Like Venus from the restless seas!
III
I conn'd a scheme, with mind elate:
My Uncle's land would fall to me,
My skill was much in school debate,
My friends were strong in Salisbury;
A place in Parliament once gain'd,
Thro' saps first labour'd out of sight,
Far loftier peaks were then attain'd
140
With easy leaps from height to height;
And that o'erwhelming honour paid,
Or recognised, at least, in life,
Which this most sweet and noble Maid
Should yield to him who call'd her Wife.
IV
I fix'd this rule: in Sarum Close
To make two visits every week,
The first to-day; and, save on those,
I nought would do, think, read, or speak,
Which did not help my settled will
To earn the Statesman's proud applause.
And now, forthwith, to mend my skill
In ethics, politics, and laws,
The Statesman's learning! Flush'd with power
And pride of freshly-form'd resolve,
I read Helvetius half-an-hour;
But, halting in attempts to solve
Why, more than all things else that be,
A lady's grace hath force to move
That sensitive appetency
Of intellectual good, call'd love,
Took Blackstone down, only to draw
My swift-deriving thoughts ere long
To love, which is the source of law,
And, like a king, can do no wrong;
Then open'd Hyde, where loyal hearts,
With faith unpropp'd by precedent,
Began to play rebellious parts.
O, mighty stir that little meant!
How dull the crude, plough'd fields of fact
To me who trod the Elysian grove!
How idle all heroic act
By the least suffering of love!
I could not read; so took my pen,
And thus commenced, in form of notes,
A Lecture for the Salisbury men,
With due regard to Tory votes:
‘A road's a road, though worn to ruts;
‘They speed who travel straight therein;
‘But he who tacks and tries short cuts
141
‘Gets fools' praise and a broken shin—’
And here I stopp'd in sheer despair;
But, what to-day was thus begun,
I vow'd, up starting from my chair,
To-morrow should indeed be done;
So loosed my chafing thoughts from school,
To play with fancy as they chose,
And then, according to my rule,
I dress'd, and came to Sarum Close.
Ah, that sweet laugh! Diviner sense
Did Nature, forming her, inspire
To omit the grosser elements,
And make her all of air and fire!
VII
To-morrow, Cowes Regatta fell:
The Dean would like his girls to go,
If I went too. ‘Most gladly.’ Well,
I did but break a foolish vow!
Unless Love's toil has love for prize,
(And then he's Hercules), above
All other contrarieties
Is labour contrary to love.
No fault of Love's, but nature's laws!
And Love, in idleness, lies quick;
For as the worm whose powers make pause,
And swoon, through alteration sick,
The soul, its wingless state dissolved,
Awaits its nuptial life complete,
All indolently self-convolved,
Cocoon'd in silken fancies sweet.
~ Coventry Patmore,#NFDB
921: VIII - EVENING A SMALL, NEATLY KEPT CHAMBER
MARGARET
(plaiting and binding up the braids of her hair)
I'd something give, could I but say
Who was that gentleman, to-day.
Surely a gallant man was he,
And of a noble family;
And much could I in his face behold,
And he wouldn't, else, have been so bold!
[Exit
MEPHISTOPHELES FAUST
MEPHISTOPHELES
Come in, but gently: follow me!
FAUST (after a moment's silence)
Leave me alone, I beg of thee!
MEPHISTOPHELES (prying about)
Not every girl keeps things so neat.
FAUST (looking around)
O welcome, twilight soft and sweet,
That breathes throughout this hallowed shrine!
Sweet pain of love, bind thou with fetters fleet
The heart that on the dew of hope must pine!
How all around a sense impresses
Of quiet, order, and content!
This poverty what bounty blesses!
What bliss within this narrow den is pent!
(He throws himself into a leathern arm-chair near the bed.)
Receive me, thou, that in thine open arms
Departed joy and pain wert wont to gather!
How oft the children, with their ruddy charms,
Hung here, around this throne, where sat the father!
Perchance my love, amid the childish band,
Grateful for gifts the Holy Christmas gave her,
Here meekly kissed the grandsire's withered hand.
I feel, O maid! thy very soul
Of order and content around me whisper,
Which leads thee with its motherly control,
The cloth upon thy board bids smoothly thee unroll,
The sand beneath thy feet makes whiter, crisper.
O dearest hand, to thee 'tis given
To change this hut into a lower heaven!
And here!
(He lifts one of the bed-curtains.)
What sweetest thrill is in my blood!
Here could I spend whole hours, delaying:
Here Nature shaped, as if in sportive playing,
The angel blossom from the bud.
Here lay the child, with Life's warm essence
The tender bosom filled and fair,
And here was wrought, through holier, purer presence,
The form diviner beings wear!
And I? What drew me here with power?
How deeply am I moved, this hour!
What seek I? Why so full my heart, and sore?
Miserable Faust! I know thee now no more.
Is there a magic vapor here?
I came, with lust of instant pleasure,
And lie dissolved in dreams of love's sweet leisure!
Are we the sport of every changeful atmosphere?
And if, this moment, came she in to me,
How would I for the fault atonement render!
How small the giant lout would be,
Prone at her feet, relaxed and tender!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Be quick! I see her there, returning.
FAUST
Go! go! I never will retreat.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Here is a casket, not unmeet,
Which elsewhere I have just been earning.
Here, set it in the press, with haste!
I swear, 'twill turn her head, to spy it:
Some baubles I therein had placed,
That you might win another by it.
True, child is child, and play is play.
FAUST
I know not, should I do it?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Ask you, pray?
Yourself, perhaps, would keep the bubble?
Then I suggest, 'twere fair and just
To spare the lovely day your lust,
And spare to me the further trouble.
You are not miserly, I trust?
I rub my hands, in expectation tender
(He places the casket in the press, and locks it again.)
Now quick, away!
The sweet young maiden to betray,
So that by wish and will you bend her;
And you look as though
To the lecture-hall you were forced to go,
As if stood before you, gray and loath,
Physics and Metaphysics both!
But away!
[Exeunt.
MARGARET (with a lamp)
It is so close, so sultry, here!
(She opens the window)
And yet 'tis not so warm outside.
I feel, I know not why, such fear!
Would mother came!where can she bide?
My body's chill and shuddering,
I'm but a silly, fearsome thing!
(She begins to sing while undressing)
There was a King in Thule,
Was faithful till the grave,
To whom his mistress, dying,
A golden goblet gave.
Naught was to him more precious;
He drained it at every bout:
His eyes with tears ran over,
As oft as he drank thereout.
When came his time of dying,
The towns in his land he told,
Naught else to his heir denying
Except the goblet of gold.
He sat at the royal banquet
With his knights of high degree,
In the lofty hall of his fathers
In the Castle by the Sea.
There stood the old carouser,
And drank the last life-glow;
And hurled the hallowed goblet
Into the tide below.
He saw it plunging and filling,
And sinking deep in the sea:
Then fell his eyelids forever,
And never more drank he!
(She opens the press in order to arrange her clothes, and perceives
the casket of jewels.)
How comes that lovely casket here to me?
I locked the press, most certainly.
'Tis truly wonderful! What can within it be?
Perhaps 'twas brought by some one as a pawn,
And mother gave a loan thereon?
And here there hangs a key to fit:
I have a mind to open it.
What is that? God in Heaven! Whence came
Such things? Never beheld I aught so fair!
Rich ornaments, such as a noble dame
On highest holidays might wear!
How would the pearl-chain suit my hair?
Ah, who may all this splendor own?
(She adorns herself with the jewelry, and steps before the
mirror.)
Were but the ear-rings mine, alone!
One has at once another air.
What helps one's beauty, youthful blood?
One may possess them, well and good;
But none the more do others care.
They praise us half in pity, sure:
To gold still tends,
On gold depends
All, all! Alas, we poor!
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, EVENING A SMALL, NEATLY KEPT CHAMBER
,#NFDB
922:A Minor Poet
"What should such fellows as I do,
Crawling between earth and heaven?"
Here is the phial; here I turn the key
Sharp in the lock. Click!--there's no doubt it turned.
This is the third time; there is luck in threes-Queen Luck, that rules the world, befriend me now
And freely I'll forgive you many wrongs!
Just as the draught began to work, first time,
Tom Leigh, my friend (as friends go in the world),
Burst in, and drew the phial from my hand,
(Ah, Tom! ah, Tom! that was a sorry turn!)
And lectured me a lecture, all compact
Of neatest, newest phrases, freshly culled
From works of newest culture: "common good ;"
"The world's great harmonies;""must be content
With knowing God works all things for the best,
And Nature never stumbles." Then again,
"The common good," and still, "the common, good;"
And what a small thing was our joy or grief
When weigh'd with that of thousands. Gentle Tom,
But you might wag your philosophic tongue
From morn till eve, and still the thing's the same:
I am myself, as each man is himself-Feels his own pain, joys his own joy, and loves
With his own love, no other's. Friend, the world
Is but one man; one man is but the world.
And I am I, and you are Tom, that bleeds
When needles prick your flesh (mark, yours, not mine).
I must confess it; I can feel the pulse
A-beating at my heart, yet never knew
The throb of cosmic pulses. I lament
The death of youth's ideal in my heart;
And, to be honest, never yet rejoiced
In the world's progress--scarce, indeed, discerned;
(For still it seems that God's a Sisyphus
With the world for stone).
You shake your head. I'm base,
13
Ignoble? Who is noble--you or I?
I was not once thus? Ah, my friend, we are
As the Fates make us.
This time is the third;
The second time the flask fell from my hand,
Its drowsy juices spilt upon the board;
And there my face fell flat, and all the life
Crept from my limbs, and hand and foot were bound
With mighty chains, subtle, intangible;
While still the mind held to its wonted use,
Or rather grew intense and keen with dread,
An awful dread--I thought I was in Hell.
In Hell, in Hell ! Was ever Hell conceived
By mortal brain, by brain Divine devised,
Darker, more fraught with torment, than the world
For such as I? A creature maimed and marr'd
From very birth. A blot, a blur, a note
All out of tune in this world's instrument.
A base thing, yet not knowing to fulfil
Base functions. A high thing, yet all unmeet
For work that's high. A dweller on the earth,
Yet not content to dig with other men
Because of certain sudden sights and sounds
(Bars of broke music; furtive, fleeting glimpse
Of angel faces 'thwart the grating seen)
Perceived in Heaven. Yet when I approach
To catch the sound's completeness, to absorb
The faces' full perfection, Heaven's gate,
Which then had stood ajar, sudden falls to,
And I, a-shiver in the dark and cold,
Scarce hear afar the mocking tones of men:
"He would not dig, forsooth ; but he must strive
For higher fruits than what our tillage yields;
Behold what comes, my brothers, of vain pride!"
Why play with figures? trifle prettily
With this my grief which very simply's said,
"There is no place for me in all the world"?
The world's a rock, and I will beat no more
A breast of flesh and blood against a rock. . .
A stride across the planks for old time's sake.
Ah, bare, small room that I have sorrowed in;
Ay, and on sunny days, haply, rejoiced;
14
We know some things together, you and I!
Hold there, you rangèd row of books ! In vain
You beckon from your shelf. You've stood my friends
Where all things else were foes; yet now I'll turn
My back upon you, even as the world
Turns it on me. And yet--farewell, farewell!
You, lofty Shakespere, with the tattered leaves
And fathomless great heart, your binding's bruised
Yet did I love you less? Goethe, farewell;
Farewell, triumphant smile and tragic eyes,
And pitiless world-wisdom!
For all men
These two. And 'tis farewell with you, my friends,
More dear because more near: Theokritus;
Heine that stings and smiles; Prometheus' bard;
(I've grown too coarse for Shelley latterly:)
And one wild singer of to-day, whose song
Is all aflame with passionate bard's blood
Lash'd into foam by pain and the world's wrong.
At least, he has a voice to cry his pain;
For him, no silent writhing in the dark,
No muttering of mute lips, no straining out
Of a weak throat a-choke with pent-up sound,
A-throb with pent-up passion. . .
Ah, my sun!
That's you, then, at the window, looking in
To beam farewell on one who's loved you long
And very truly. Up, you creaking thing,
You squinting, cobwebbed casement!
So, at last,
I can drink in the sunlight. How it falls.
Across that endless sea of London roofs,
Weaving such golden wonders on the grey,
That almost, for the moment, we forget
The world of woe beneath them.
Underneath,
For all the sunset glory, Pain is king.
Yet, the sun's there, and very sweet withal;
And I'll not grumble that it's only sun,
But open wide my lips--thus--drink it in;
15
Turn up my face to the sweet evening sky
(What royal wealth of scarlet on the blue
So tender toned, you'd almost think it green)
And stretch my hands out--so--to grasp it tight.
Ha, ha! 'tis sweet awhile to cheat the Fates,
And be as happy as another man.
The sun works in my veins like wine, like wine!
'Tis a fair world: if dark, indeed, with woe,
Yet having hope and hint of such a joy,
That a man, winning, well might turn aside,
Careless of Heaven . . .
O enough; I turn
From the sun's light, or haply I shall hope.
I have hoped enough; I would not hope again:
'Tis hope that is most cruel.
Tom, my friend,
You very sorry philosophic fool;
'Tis you, I think, that bid me be resign'd,
Trust, and be thankful.
Out on you! Resign'd?
I'm not resign'd, not patient, not school'd in
To take my starveling's portion and pretend
I'm grateful for it. I want all, all, all;
I've appetite for all. I want the best:
Love, beauty, sunlight, nameless joy of life.
There's too much patience in the world, I think.
We have grown base with crooking of the knee.
Mankind--say--God has bidden to a feast;
The board is spread, and groans with cates and drinks;
In troop the guests; each man with appetite
Keen-whetted with expectance.
In they troop,
Struggle for seats, jostle and push and seize.
What's this? what's this? There are not seats for all!
Some men must stand without the gates; and some
Must linger by the table, ill-supplied
With broken meats. One man gets meat for two,
The while another hungers. If I stand
Without the portals, seeing others eat
Where I had thought to satiate the pangs
Of mine own hunger; shall I then come forth
When all is done, and drink my Lord's good health
16
In my Lord's water? Shall I not rather turn
And curse him, curse him for a niggard host?
O, I have hungered, hungered, through the years,
Till appetite grows craving, then disease;
I am starved, wither'd, shrivelled.
Peace, O peace!
This rage is idle; what avails to curse
The nameless forces, the vast silences
That work in all things.
This time is the third,
I wrought before in heat, stung mad with pain,
Blind, scarcely understanding; now I know
What thing I do.
There was a woman once;
Deep eyes she had, white hands, a subtle smile,
Soft speaking tones: she did not break my heart,
Yet haply had her heart been otherwise
Mine had not now been broken. Yet, who knows?
My life was jarring discord from the first:
Tho' here and there brief hints of melody,
Of melody unutterable, clove the air.
From this bleak world, into the heart of night,
The dim, deep bosom of the universe,
I cast myself. I only crave for rest;
Too heavy is the load. I fling it down.
EPILOGUE.
We knocked and knocked; at last, burst in the door,
And found him as you know--the outstretched arms
Propping the hidden face. The sun had set,
And all the place was dim with lurking shade.
There was no written word to say farewell,
Or make more clear the deed.
I search'd and search'd;
The room held little: just a row of books
Much scrawl'd and noted; sketches on the wall,
Done rough in charcoal; the old instrument
(A violin, no Stradivarius)
He played so ill on; in the table drawer
Large schemes of undone work. Poems half-writ;
17
Wild drafts of symphonies; big plans of fugues;
Some scraps of writing in a woman's hand:
No more--the scattered pages of a tale,
A sorry tale that no man cared to read.
Alas, my friend, I lov'd him well, tho' he
Held me a cold and stagnant-blooded fool,
Because I am content to watch, and wait
With a calm mind the issue of all things.
Certain it is my blood's no turbid stream;
Yet, for all that, haply I understood
More than he ever deem'd; nor held so light
The poet in him. Nay, I sometimes doubt
If they have not, indeed, the better part-These poets, who get drunk with sun, and weep
Because the night or a woman's face is fair.
Meantime there is much talk about my friend.
The women say, of course, he died for love;
The men, for lack of gold, or cavilling
Of carping critics. I, Tom Leigh, his friend
I have no word at all to say of this.
Nay, I had deem'd him more philosopher;
For did he think by this one paltry deed
To cut the knot of circumstance, and snap
The chain which binds all being?
~ Amy Levy,#NFDB
923:A Pastoral Dialogue - Ii
Melibæus, Alcippe, Asteria, Licida, Alcimedon, and Amira.
Melibæus. Welcome fair Nymphs, most welcome to this shade,
Distemp'ring Heats do now the Plains invade:
But you may sit, from Sun securely here,
If you an old mans company not fear.
Alcippe. Most Reverend Swaine, far from us ever be
The imputation of such Vanity.
From Hill to Holt w'ave thee unweary'd sought,
And bless the Chance that us hath hither brought.
Asteria. Fam'd Melibæus for thy Virtuous Lays,
If thou dost not disdain our Female Praise,
We come to sue thou would'st to us recite
One of thy Songs, which gives such high delight
To ev'ry Eare, wherein thou dost dispense
Sage Precepts cloath'd in flowing Eloquence.
Licida. Fresh Garlands we will make for thee each morne,
Thy reverend Head to shade, and to adorne;
To cooling Springs thy fainting Flock we'll guide,
All thou command'st, to do shall be our Pride.
Meli. Cease, gentle Nymphs, the Willing to entreat,
To have your Wish, each needs but take a Seat.
With joy I shall my ancient Art revive,
With which, when Young, I did for Glory strive.
Nor for my Verse will I accept a Hire,
Your bare Attentions all I shall require.
Alci. Lo, from the Plain I see draw near a Pair
That I could wish in our Converse might share.
Amira 'tis and young Alcimedon.
Lici. Serious Discourse industriously they shun.
Alci.
It being yet their luck to come this way,
The Fond Ones to our Lecture we'll betray:
And though they only sought a private shade,
Perhaps they may depart more Vertuous made.
I will accost them. Gentle Nymph and Swaine,
Good Melibæus us doth entertain
With Lays Divine: if you'll his Hearers be,
Take streight your Seats without Apology.
Alci. Paying short thanks, at fair Amiras feet,
I'le lay me down: let her choose where 'tis meet.
Al. Shepherd, behold, we all attentive sit.
Meli.
What shall I sing? what shall my Muse reherse?
Love is a Theme well sutes a Past'ral Verse,
That gen'ral Error, Universal Ill,
That Darling of our Weakness and our Will;
By which though many fall, few hold it shame;
Smile at the Fault, which they would seem to blame.
What wonder then, if those with Mischief play,
It to destruction them doth oft betray?
But by experience it is daily found,
That Love the softer Sex does sorest wound;
In Mind, as well as Body, far more weak
Than Men: therefore to them my Song shall speak,
Advising well, however it succeed:
But unto All I say, Of Love take heed.
So hazardous, because so hard to know
On whom they are we do our Hearts bestow;
How they will use them, or with what regard
Our Faith and high Esteem they will reward:
For few are found, that truly acted be
By Principles of Generosity.
That when they know a Virgins Heart they've gain'd,
(And though by many Vows and Arts obtain'd)
Will think themselves oblig'd their Faith to hold
Tempted by Friends, by Interest, or by Gold.
Expect it not most, Love their Pastime make,
Lightly they Like, and lightly they forsake;
10
Their Roving Humour wants but a pretence
With Oaths and what's most Sacred to dispence.
When unto such a Maid has given her Heart,
And said, Alone my Happiness thou art,
In thee and in thy Truth I place my Rest.
Her sad Surprize how can it be exprest,
When all on which she built her Joy she finds,
Vanish, like Clouds, disperst before the Winds;
Her self, who th' adored Idol wont to be,
A poor despis'd Idolater to see?
Regardless Tears she may profusely spend,
Unpitty'd sighs her tender Breast may rend:
But the false Image she will ne're erace,
Though far unworthy still to hold its place:
So hard it is, even Wiser grown, to take
Th' Impression out, which Fancy once did make.
Believe me Nymphs, believe my hoary hairs,
Truth and Experience waits on many years.
Before the Eldest of you Light beheld,
A Nymph we had, in Beauty all excell'd,
Rodanthe call'd, in whom each Grace did shine,
Could make a Mortal Maid appear Divine.
And none could say, where most her Charms did lye,
In her inchanting Tongue, or conquering Eye.
Her Vertue yet her Beauties so out-shon,
As Beauty did the Garments she put on!
Among the Swains, which here their Flocks then fed,
Alcander with the highest held his head;
The most Accomplish't was esteem'd to be,
Of comely Forme, well-grac't Activity;
The Muses too, like him, did none inspire,
None so did stop the Pipe, or touch the Lyre;
Sweet was his Voice, and Eloquent his Tongue;
Alike admired when he Spoke, or Sung!
But these so much Excelling parts the Swain,
With Imperfections no less Great, did stain:
For proud he was, of an Ungovern'd Will,
11
With Love Familiar, but a Stranger still
To Faith and Constancy; and did his Heart,
Retaining none, expose to ev'ry Dart.
Hapless Rodanthe, the Fond Rover, caught,
To whom, for Love, with usual Arts he sought;
Which she, ah too unwary, did bestow:
'Cause True her self, believ'd that he was so.
But he, alas, more wav'ring than the Wind,
Streight broke the Chain, she thought so fast did bind;
For he no sooner saw her Heart was gain'd,
But he as soon the Victory disdain'd;
Mad Love else-where, as if 'twere like Renown,
Hearts to subdue, as to take in a Town:
But in the One as Manhood does prevail,
Both Truth and Manhood in the other fail.
And now the Nymph (of late so gay and bright,
The Glory of the Plains and the Delight,
Who still in Wit and Mirth all Pastimes led)
Hung like a wither'd Flow'r her drooping Head.
I need not tell the Grief Rodanthe found,
How all that should asswage, enrag'd her Wound;
Her Form, her Fame, her Vertue, Riches, Wit,
Like Deaths sad Weights upon her Soul did sit:
Or else like Furies stood before her Face,
Still urging and Upbraiding her Disgrace,
In that the World could yield her no Content,
But what alone the False Alcander sent.
'Twas said, through just Disdain, at last she broke
The Disingenious and Unworthy Yoke:
But this I know, her Passion held long time,
Constancy, though Unhappy, is no Crime.
Remember when you Love, from that same hour
Your Peace you put into your Lovers Power:
From that same hour from him you Laws receive,
And as he shall ordain, you Joy, or Grieve,
Hope, Fear, Laugh, Weep; Reason aloof does stand,
Disabl'd both to Act, and to Command.
Oh Cruel Fetters! rather wish to feel,
On your soft Limbs, the Gauling Weight of Steel;
12
Rather to bloudy Wounds oppose your Breast
No Ill, by which the Body can be prest;
You will so sensible a Torment find,
As Shackles on your captivated Mind.
The Mind from Heaven its high Descent did draw,
And brooks uneasily any other Law,
Than what from Reason dictated shall be,
Reason, a kind of In-mate Deity.
Which only can adapt to ev'ry Soul
A Yoke so fit and light, that the Controle
All Liberty excels; so sweet a Sway,
The same 'tis to be Happy, and Obey;
Commands so Wise and with Rewards so drest
That the according Soul replys, I'm Blest.
This teaches rightly how to Love and Hate,
To fear and hope by Measure and just Weight;
What Tears in Grief ought from our Eyes to flow,
What Transport in Felicity to show;
In ev'ry Passion how to steer the Will,
Tho rude the Shock, to keep it steady still.
Oh happy Mind! what words, can speak thy Bliss,
When in a Harmony thou mov'st like this?
Your Hearts fair Virgins keep smooth as your Brow,
Not the least Am'rous Passion there allow;
Hold not a Parly with what may betray
Your inward Freedom to a Forraign Sway;
And while thus ore your selves you Queens remain,
Unenvy'd, ore the World, let others reign:
The highest Joy which from Dominion flows,
Is short of what a Mind well-govern'd knows.
Whither my Muse, would'st uncontrouled run?
Contend in Motion with the restless Sun?
Immortal thou, but I a mortal Sire
Exhaust my strength, and Hearers also tire.
Al. O Heaven-taught Bard! to Ages couldst prolong
Thy Soul-instructing, Health-infusing Song,
I with unweary'd Appetite could hear,
13
And wish my Senses were turn'd all to Ear.
Alcim. Old Man, thy frosty Precepts well betray
Thy Blood is cold, and that thy Head is grey:
Who past the Pleasure Love and Youth can give,
To spoyl't in others, now dost only live.
Wouldst thou, indeed, if so thou couldst perswade,
The Fair, whose Charms have many Lovers made,
Should feel Compassion for no one they wound,
But be to all Inexorable found?
Me. Young man, if my advice thou well hadst weigh'd,
Thou would'st have found, for either Sex 'twas made;
And would from Womens Beauty thee no less
Preserve, than them secure from thy Address.
But let thy Youth thy rash Reproach excuse.
Alci. Fairest Amira let him not abuse
Thy gentle Heart, by his imprinting there
His doting Maxims—But I will not fear:
For when 'gainst Love he fiercest did inveigh,
Methoughts I saw thee turn with Scorn away.
Ami. Alcimedon according to his Will
Does all my Words and Looks interpret still:
But I shall learn at length how to Disdain,
Or at the least more cunningly to feign.
Alci. No wonder thou Alcimedon art rude,
When with no Gen'rous Quality endu'd:
But hop'st by railing Words Vice to defend,
Which Foulers made, by having such a Friend.
Amira, thou art warn'd, wisely beware,
Leap not with Open-Eyes into the Snare:
The Faith that's given to thee, was given before
To Nais, Amoret, and many more:
The Perjur'd did the Gods to Witness call,
That unto each he was the only Thrall.
Aste. Y'ave made his Cheeks with Conscious blushes glow.
14
Alci. 'Tis the best Colour a False Heart can show;
And well it is with Guilt some shame remains.
Meli. Hast, Shepherd, hast to cleanse away thy stains,
Let not thy Youth, of Time the goodly spring,
Neglected pass, that nothing forth it bring
But noxious Weeds: which cultivated might
Produce such Crops, as now would thee delight,
And give thee after Fame For Vertues Fruit
Believe it, not alone with Age does sute,
Nought adorns Youth like to a Noble Mind,
In thee this Union let Amira find.
Lici. O fear her not! she'l serve him in his kind.
Meli. See how Discourse upon the Time does prey,
Those hours pass swiftest, that we talk away.
Declining Sol forsaken hath the Fields,
And Mountains highest Summits only gildes:
Which warns us home-wards with our Flocks to make.
Alci. Along with thee our Thanks and Praises take.
Aste. In which our Hearts do all in One unite,
Lici. Our Wishes too, That on thy Head may light,
What e're the Gods as their Best Gifts bestow.
Meli. Kind Nymphs on you may Equal Blessings flow.
~ Anne Killigrew,#NFDB
924:Monadnoc
Thousand minstrels woke within me,
Our music's in the hills;
Gayest pictures rose to win me,
Leopard-colored rills.
Up!If thou knew'st who calls
To twilight parks of beech and pine,
High over the river intervals,
Above the ploughman's highest line,
Over the owner's farthest walls;
Up!where the airy citadel
O'erlooks the purging landscape's swell.
Let not unto the stones the day
Her lily and rose, her sea and land display;
Read the celestial sign!
Lo! the South answers to the North;
Bookworm, break this sloth urbane;
A greater Spirit bids thee forth,
Than the gray dreams which thee detain.
Mark how the climbing Oreads
Beckon thee to their arcades;
Youth, for a moment free as they,
Teach thy feet to feel the ground,
Ere yet arrive the wintry day
When Time thy feet has bound.
Accept the bounty of thy birth;
Taste the lordship of the earth.
I heard and I obeyed,
Assured that he who pressed the claim,
Well-known, but loving not a name,
Was not to be gainsaid.
Ere yet the summoning voice was still,
I turned to Cheshire's haughty hill.
From the fixed cone the cloud-rack flowed
Like ample banner flung abroad
Round about, a hundred miles,
With invitation to the sea, and to the bordering isles.
In his own loom's garment drest,
By his own bounty blest,
Fast abides this constant giver,
Pouring many a cheerful river;
To far eyes, an arial isle,
Unploughed, which finer spirits pile,
Which morn and crimson evening paint
For bard, for lover, and for saint;
The country's core,
Inspirer, prophet evermore,
Pillar which God aloft had set
So that men might it not forget,
It should be their life's ornament,
And mix itself with each event;
Their calendar and dial,
Barometer, and chemic phial,
Garden of berries, perch of birds,
Pasture of pool-haunting herds,
Graced by each change of sum untold,
Earth-baking heat, stone-cleaving cold.
The Titan minds his sky-affairs,
Rich rents and wide alliance shares;
Mysteries of color daily laid
By the great sun in light and shade,
And, sweet varieties of chance,
And the mystic seasons' dance,
And thief-like step of liberal hours
Which thawed the snow-drift into flowers.
O wondrous craft of plant and stone
By eldest science done and shown!
Happy, I said, whose home is here,
Fair fortunes to the mountaineer!
Boon nature to his poorest shed
Has royal pleasure-grounds outspread.
Intent I searched the region round,
And in low hut my monarch found.
He was no eagle and no earl,
Alas! my foundling was a churl,
With heart of cat, and eyes of bug,
Dull victim of his pipe and mug;
Woe is me for my hopes' downfall!
Lord! is yon squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed
For God's vicegerency and stead?
Time out of mind this forge of ores,
Quarry of spars in mountain pores,
Old cradle, hunting ground, and bier
Of wolf and otter, bear, and deer;
Well-built abode of many a race;
Tower of observance searching space;
Factory of river, and of rain;
Link in the alps' globe-girding chain;
By million changes skilled to tell
What in the Eternal standeth well,
And what obedient nature can,
Is this colossal talisman
Kindly to creature, blood, and kind,
And speechless to the master's mind?
I thought to find the patriots
In whom the stock of freedom roots.
To myself I oft recount
Tales of many a famous mount.
Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary's dells,
Roys, and Scanderbegs, and Tells.
Here now shall nature crowd her powers,
Her music, and her meteors,
And, lifting man to the blue deep
Where stars their perfect courses keep,
Like wise preceptor lure his eye
To sound the science of the sky,
And carry learning to its height
Of untried power and sane delight;
The Indian cheer, the frosty skies
Breed purer wits, inventive eyes,
Eyes that frame cities where none be,
And hands that stablish what these see:
And, by the moral of his place,
Hint summits of heroic grace;
Man in these crags a fastness find
To fight pollution of the mind;
In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,
Adhere like this foundation strong,
The insanity of towns to stem
With simpleness for stratagem.
But if the brave old mould is broke,
And end in clowns the mountain-folk,
In tavern cheer and tavern joke,
Sink, O mountain! in the swamp,
Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lap!
Perish like leaves the highland breed!
No sire survive, no son succeed!
Soft! let not the offended muse
Toil's hard hap with scorn accuse.
Many hamlets sought I then,
Many farms of mountain men;
Found I not a minstrel seed,
But men of bone, and good at need.
Rallying round a parish steeple
Nestle warm the highland people,
Coarse and boisterous, yet mild,
Strong as giant, slow as child,
Smoking in a squalid room,
Where yet the westland breezes come.
Close hid in those rough guises lurk
Western magicians, here they work;
Sweat and season are their arts,
Their talismans are ploughs and carts;
And well the youngest can command
Honey from the frozen land,
With sweet hay the swamp adorn,
Change the running sand to corn,
For wolves and foxes, lowing herds,
And for cold mosses, cream and curds;
Weave wood to canisters and mats,
Drain sweet maple-juice in vats.
No bird is safe that cuts the air,
From their rifle or their snare;
No fish in river or in lake,
But their long hands it thence will take;
And the country's iron face
Like wax their fashioning skill betrays,
To fill the hollows, sink the hills,
Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,
And fit the bleak and howling place
For gardens of a finer race,
The world-soul knows his own affair,
Fore-looking when his hands prepare
For the next ages men of mould,
Well embodied, well ensouled,
He cools the present's fiery glow,
Sets the life pulse strong, but slow.
Bitter winds and fasts austere.
His quarantines and grottos, where
He slowly cures decrepit flesh,
And brings it infantile and fresh.
These exercises are the toys
And games with which he breathes his boys.
They bide their time, and well can prove,
If need were, their line from Jove,
Of the same stuff, and so allayed,
As that whereof the sun is made;
And of that fibre quick and strong
Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.
Now in sordid weeds they sleep,
Their secret now in dullness keep.
Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
These the masters who can teach,
Fourscore or a hundred words
All their vocal muse affords,
These they turn in other fashion
Than the writer or the parson.
I can spare the college-bell,
And the learned lecture well.
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For the hardy English root
Thrives here unvalued underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground and never soars,
While Jake retorts and Reuben roars,
Tough and screaming as birch-bark,
Goes like bullet to its mark,
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear:
To student ears keen-relished jokes
On truck, and stock, and farming-folks,
Nought the mountain yields thereof
But savage health and sinews tough.
On the summit as I stood,
O'er the wide floor of plain and flood,
Seemed to me the towering hill
Was not altogether still,
But a quiet sense conveyed;
If I err not, thus it said:
Many feet in summer seek
Betimes my far-appearing peak;
In the dreaded winter-time,
None save dappling shadows climb
Under clouds my lonely head,
Old as the sun, old almost as the shade.
And comest thou
To see strange forests and new snow,
And tread uplifted land?
And leavest thou thy lowland race,
Here amid clouds to stand,
And would'st be my companion,
Where I gaze
And shall gaze
When forests fall, and man is gone,
Over tribes and over times
As the burning Lyre
Nearing me,
With its stars of northern fire,
In many a thousand years.
Ah! welcome, if thou bring
My secret in thy brain;
To mountain-top may muse's wing
With good allowance strain.
Gentle pilgrim, if thou know
The gamut old of Pan,
And how the hills began,
The frank blessings of the hill
Fall on thee, as fall they will.
'Tis the law of bush and stone
Each can only take his own.
Let him heed who can and will,
Enchantment fixed me here
To stand the hurts of time, until
In mightier chant I disappear.
If thou trowest
How the chemic eddies play
Pole to pole, and what they say,
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;
Can thy style-discerning eye
The hidden-working Builder spy,
Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
With hammer soft as snow-flake's flight;
Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.
For the world was built in order,
And the atoms march in tune,
Rhyme the pipe, and time the warder,
Cannot forget the sun, the moon.
Orb and atom forth they prance,
When they hear from far the rune,
None so backward in the troop,
When the music and the dance
Reach his place and circumstance,
But knows the sun-creating sound,
And, though a pyramid, will bound.
Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among,
But well I know, no mountain can
Measure with a perfect man;
For it is on Zodiack's writ,
Adamant is soft to wit;
And when the greater comes again,
With my music in his brain,
I shall pass as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.
Through all time
I hear the approaching feet
Along the flinty pathway beat
Of him that cometh, and shall come,
Of him who shall as lightly bear
My daily load of woods and streams,
As now the round sky-cleaving boat
Which never strains its rocky beams,
Whose timbers, as they silent float,
Alps and Caucasus uprear,
And the long Alleghanies here,
And all town-sprinkled lands that be,
Sailing through stars with all their history.
Every morn I lift my head,
Gaze o'er New England underspread
South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,
From Katshill east to the sea-bound.
Anchored fast for many an age,
I await the bard and sage,
Who in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.
Comes that cheerful troubadour,
This mound shall throb his face before,
As when with inward fires and pain
It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed
From this well-spring in my head
Fountain drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil;
There's a berry blue and gold,
Autumn-ripe its juices hold,
Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,
Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight;
I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan's immortal meat,
Bread to eat and juice to drink,
So the thoughts that he shall think
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk
From South-Cove and City-wharf;
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath,
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow;
Open the daunting map beneath,
All his county, sea and land,
Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city tops a glimmering haze:
I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;
See there the grim gray rounding
Of the bullet of the earth
Whereon ye sail,
Tumbling steep
In the uncontinented deep;
He looks on that, and he turns pale:
'Tis even so, this treacherous kite,
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on for ever,
And he, poor parasite,
Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not,
Risk or ruin he must share.
I scowl on him with my cloud,
With my north wind chill his blood,
I lame him clattering down the rocks,
And to live he is in fear.
Then, at last, I let him down
Once more into his dapper town,
To chatter frightened to his clan,
And forget me, if he can.
As in the old poetic fame
The gods are blind and lame,
And the simular despite
Betrays the more abounding might,
So call not waste that barren cone
Above the floral zone,
Where forests starve:
It is pure use;
What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind,
Of a celestial Ceres, and the Muse?
Ages are thy days,
Thou grand expressor of the present tense,
And type of permanence,
Firm ensign of the fatal Being,
Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief
That will not bide the seeing.
Hither we bring
Our insect miseries to the rocks,
And the whole flight with pestering wing
Vanish and end their murmuring,
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which, who can tell what mason laid?
Spoils of a front none need restore,
Replacing frieze and architrave;
Yet flowers each stone rosette and metope brave,
Still is the haughty pile erect
Of the old building Intellect.
Complement of human kind,
Having us at vantage still,
Our sumptuous indigence,
O barren mound! thy plenties fill.
We fool and prate,
Thou art silent and sedate.
To million kinds and times one sense
The constant mountain doth dispense,
Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
Thou seest, O watchman tall!
Our towns and races grow and fall,
And imagest the stable Good
For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind;
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.
Thou in our astronomy
An opaker star,
Seen, haply, from afar,
Above the horizon's hoop.
A moment by the railway troop,
As o'er some bolder height they speed,
By circumspect ambition,
By errant Gain,
By feasters, and the frivolous,
Recallest us,
And makest sane.
Mute orator! well-skilled to plead,
And send conviction without phrase,
Thou dost supply
The shortness of our days,
And promise, on thy Founder's truth,
Long morrow to this mortal youth.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Monadnoc
,#NFDB
925:One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, was drawn by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story.
As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing --specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does', the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling --which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos': and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.
It is, no doubt, possible to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,--if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,--that I could 'fulfil my task,' and produce my 'tale of bricks,' as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced--that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!
This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of 'padding' which might fitly be defined as 'that which all can write and none can read.' That the present volume contains no such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines : but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do.
My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of 'padding' it contains. While arranging the 'slips' into pages, I found that the passage was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess which they are?
A harder puzzle if a harder be desired would be to determine, as to the Gardener's Song, in which cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in which (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza.
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come's is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story--I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it--but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'--is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
Hence it is that, in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' I have striven with I know not what success to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.
If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written--which I should much like to attempt, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through--in the hope that, if I should fail (and the years are gliding away very fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.
First, a Child's Bible. The only real essentials of this would be, carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love--no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great difficulty: no new ones would be needed : hundreds of excellent pictures already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size with a pretty attractive looking cover--in a clear legible type--and, above all, with abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!
Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible--not single texts, but passages of from 10 to 20 verses each--to be committed to memory. Such passages would be found useful, to repeat to one's self and to ponder over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible: for instance, when lying awake at night--on a railway-journey --when taking a solitary walk-in old age, when eyesight is failing or wholly lost--and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of David's rapturous cry "O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth!"
I have said 'passages,' rather than single texts, because we have no means of recalling single texts: memory needs links, and here are none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen--and those by mere chance: whereas, once get hold of any portion of a chapter that has been committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.
Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages--enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.
These two books of sacred, and secular, passages for memory--will serve other good purposes besides merely occupying vacant hours: they will help to keep at bay many anxious thoughts, worrying thoughts, uncharitable thoughts, unholy thoughts. Let me say this, in better words than my own, by copying a passage from that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX. "If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images, which will generally be at periodical hours, let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy, suicidal thoughts, beset him. Let these be to him the sword, turning everywhere to keep the way of the Garden of Life from the intrusion of profaner footsteps."
Fourthly, a "Shakespeare" for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. Few children under 10 would be likely to understand or enjoy the greatest of poets: and those, who have passed out of girlhood, may safely be left to read Shakespeare, in any edition, 'expurgated' or not, that they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children, in the intermediate stage, should be debarred from a great pleasure for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated.' Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out! Besides relentlessly erasing all that is unsuitable on the score of reverence or decency, I should be inclined to omit also all that seems too difficult, or not likely to interest young readers. The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry.
If it be needful to apologize to any one for the new departure I have taken in this story--by introducing, along with what will, I hope, prove to be acceptable nonsense for children, some of the graver thoughts of human life--it must be to one who has learned the Art of keeping such thoughts wholly at a distance in hours of mirth and careless ease. To him such a mixture will seem, no doubt, ill-judged and repulsive. And that such an Art exists I do not dispute: with youth, good health, and sufficient money, it seems quite possible to lead, for years together, a life of unmixed gaiety--with the exception of one solemn fact, with which we are liable to be confronted at any moment, even in the midst of the most brilliant company or the most sparkling entertainment. A man may fix his own times for admitting serious thought, for attending public worship, for prayer, for reading the Bible: all such matters he can defer to that 'convenient season', which is so apt never to occur at all: but he cannot defer, for one single moment, the necessity of attending to a message, which may come before he has finished reading this page,' this night shalt thy soul be required of thee.'
The ever-present sense of this grim possibility has been, in all ages, 1 an incubus that men have striven to shake off. Few more interesting subjects of enquiry could be found, by a student of history, than the various weapons that have been used against this shadowy foe. Saddest of all must have been the thoughts of those who saw indeed an existence beyond the grave, but an existence far more terrible than annihilation--an existence as filmy, impalpable, all but invisible spectres, drifting about, through endless ages, in a world of shadows, with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to love! In the midst of the gay verses of that genial 'bon vivant' Horace, there stands one dreary word whose utter sadness goes to one's heart. It is the word 'exilium' in the well-known passage
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura et nos in aeternum
Exilium impositura cymbae.
Yes, to him this present life--spite of all its weariness and all its sorrow--was the only life worth having: all else was 'exile'! Does it not seem almost incredible that one, holding such a creed, should ever have smiled?
And many in this day, I fear, even though believing in an existence beyond the grave far more real than Horace ever dreamed of, yet regard it as a sort of 'exile' from all the joys of life, and so adopt Horace's theory, and say 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'
We go to entertainments, such as the theatre--I say 'we', for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one and keep at arm's length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know--dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface that it may not be your lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis--to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you to hear their troubled whispers perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, "Is it serious?", and to be told "Yes: the end is near" (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)--how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?
And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself "Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too 'risky', the dialogue a little too strong, the 'business' a little too suggestive.
I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow." To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!
"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'
Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for 'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger.
But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine 'Sport': I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some 'man-eating' tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those 'tender and delicate' beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love--'thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'--whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!
'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno,#NFDB
926:The Princess (Part 2)
At break of day the College Portress came:
She brought us Academic silks, in hue
The lilac, with a silken hood to each,
And zoned with gold; and now when these were on,
And we as rich as moths from dusk cocoons,
She, curtseying her obeisance, let us know
The Princess Ida waited: out we paced,
I first, and following through the porch that sang
All round with laurel, issued in a court
Compact of lucid marbles, bossed with lengths
Of classic frieze, with ample awnings gay
Betwixt the pillars, and with great urns of flowers.
The Muses and the Graces, grouped in threes,
Enringed a billowing fountain in the midst;
And here and there on lattice edges lay
Or book or lute; but hastily we past,
And up a flight of stairs into the hall.
There at a board by tome and paper sat,
With two tame leopards couched beside her throne,
All beauty compassed in a female form,
The Princess; liker to the inhabitant
Of some clear planet close upon the Sun,
Than our man's earth; such eyes were in her head,
And so much grace and power, breathing down
From over her arched brows, with every turn
Lived through her to the tips of her long hands,
And to her feet. She rose her height, and said:
'We give you welcome: not without redound
Of use and glory to yourselves ye come,
The first-fruits of the stranger: aftertime,
And that full voice which circles round the grave,
Will rank you nobly, mingled up with me.
What! are the ladies of your land so tall?'
'We of the court' said Cyril. 'From the court'
She answered, 'then ye know the Prince?' and he:
'The climax of his age! as though there were
One rose in all the world, your Highness that,
726
He worships your ideal:' she replied:
'We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear
This barren verbiage, current among men,
Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.
Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem
As arguing love of knowledge and of power;
Your language proves you still the child. Indeed,
We dream not of him: when we set our hand
To this great work, we purposed with ourself
Never to wed. You likewise will do well,
Ladies, in entering here, to cast and fling
The tricks, which make us toys of men, that so,
Some future time, if so indeed you will,
You may with those self-styled our lords ally
Your fortunes, justlier balanced, scale with scale.'
At those high words, we conscious of ourselves,
Perused the matting: then an officer
Rose up, and read the statutes, such as these:
Not for three years to correspond with home;
Not for three years to cross the liberties;
Not for three years to speak with any men;
And many more, which hastily subscribed,
We entered on the boards: and 'Now,' she cried,
'Ye are green wood, see ye warp not. Look, our hall!
Our statues!--not of those that men desire,
Sleek Odalisques, or oracles of mode,
Nor stunted squaws of West or East; but she
That taught the Sabine how to rule, and she
The foundress of the Babylonian wall,
The Carian Artemisia strong in war,
The Rhodope, that built the pyramid,
Clelia, Cornelia, with the Palmyrene
That fought Aurelian, and the Roman brows
Of Agrippina. Dwell with these, and lose
Convention, since to look on noble forms
Makes noble through the sensuous organism
That which is higher. O lift your natures up:
Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
727
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble. Leave us: you may go:
Today the Lady Psyche will harangue
The fresh arrivals of the week before;
For they press in from all the provinces,
And fill the hive.'
She spoke, and bowing waved
Dismissal: back again we crost the court
To Lady Psyche's: as we entered in,
There sat along the forms, like morning doves
That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch,
A patient range of pupils; she herself
Erect behind a desk of satin-wood,
A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed,
And on the hither side, or so she looked,
Of twenty summers. At her left, a child,
In shining draperies, headed like a star,
Her maiden babe, a double April old,
Aglaïa slept. We sat: the Lady glanced:
Then Florian, but not livelier than the dame
That whispered 'Asses' ears', among the sedge,
'My sister.' 'Comely, too, by all that's fair,'
Said Cyril. 'Oh hush, hush!' and she began.
'This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides,
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets: then the monster, then the man;
Tattooed or woaded, winter-clad in skins,
Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate;
As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here
Among the lowest.'
Thereupon she took
A bird's-eye-view of all the ungracious past;
Glanced at the legendary Amazon
As emblematic of a nobler age;
Appraised the Lycian custom, spoke of those
That lay at wine with Lar and Lucumo;
Ran down the Persian, Grecian, Roman lines
Of empire, and the woman's state in each,
How far from just; till warming with her theme
She fulmined out her scorn of laws Salique
728
And little-footed China, touched on Mahomet
With much contempt, and came to chivalry:
When some respect, however slight, was paid
To woman, superstition all awry:
However then commenced the dawn: a beam
Had slanted forward, falling in a land
Of promise; fruit would follow. Deep, indeed,
Their debt of thanks to her who first had dared
To leap the rotten pales of prejudice,
Disyoke their necks from custom, and assert
None lordlier than themselves but that which made
Woman and man. She had founded; they must build.
Here might they learn whatever men were taught:
Let them not fear: some said their heads were less:
Some men's were small; not they the least of men;
For often fineness compensated size:
Besides the brain was like the hand, and grew
With using; thence the man's, if more was more;
He took advantage of his strength to be
First in the field: some ages had been lost;
But woman ripened earlier, and her life
Was longer; and albeit their glorious names
Were fewer, scattered stars, yet since in truth
The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,
Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,
But Homer, Plato, Verulam; even so
With woman: and in arts of government
Elizabeth and others; arts of war
The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace
Sappho and others vied with any man:
And, last not least, she who had left her place,
And bowed her state to them, that they might grow
To use and power on this Oasis, lapt
In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight
Of ancient influence and scorn.
At last
She rose upon a wind of prophecy
Dilating on the future; 'everywhere
Who heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
729
Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind:
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:
And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth
Should bear a double growth of those rare souls,
Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.'
She ended here, and beckoned us: the rest
Parted; and, glowing full-faced welcome, she
Began to address us, and was moving on
In gratulation, till as when a boat
Tacks, and the slackened sail flaps, all her voice
Faltering and fluttering in her throat, she cried
'My brother!' 'Well, my sister.' 'O,' she said,
'What do you here? and in this dress? and these?
Why who are these? a wolf within the fold!
A pack of wolves! the Lord be gracious to me!
A plot, a plot, a plot to ruin all!'
'No plot, no plot,' he answered. 'Wretched boy,
How saw you not the inscription on the gate,
LET NO MAN ENTER IN ON PAIN OF DEATH?'
'And if I had,' he answered, 'who could think
The softer Adams of your Academe,
O sister, Sirens though they be, were such
As chanted on the blanching bones of men?'
'But you will find it otherwise' she said.
'You jest: ill jesting with edge-tools! my vow
Binds me to speak, and O that iron will,
That axelike edge unturnable, our Head,
The Princess.' 'Well then, Psyche, take my life,
And nail me like a weasel on a grange
For warning: bury me beside the gate,
And cut this epitaph above my bones;
~Here lies a brother by a sister slain,
All for the common good of womankind.~'
'Let me die too,' said Cyril, 'having seen
And heard the Lady Psyche.'
I struck in:
'Albeit so masked, Madam, I love the truth;
Receive it; and in me behold the Prince
Your countryman, affianced years ago
To the Lady Ida: here, for here she was,
730
And thus (what other way was left) I came.'
'O Sir, O Prince, I have no country; none;
If any, this; but none. Whate'er I was
Disrooted, what I am is grafted here.
Affianced, Sir? love-whispers may not breathe
Within this vestal limit, and how should I,
Who am not mine, say, live: the thunderbolt
Hangs silent; but prepare: I speak; it falls.'
'Yet pause,' I said: 'for that inscription there,
I think no more of deadly lurks therein,
Than in a clapper clapping in a garth,
To scare the fowl from fruit: if more there be,
If more and acted on, what follows? war;
Your own work marred: for this your Academe,
Whichever side be Victor, in the halloo
Will topple to the trumpet down, and pass
With all fair theories only made to gild
A stormless summer.' 'Let the Princess judge
Of that' she said: 'farewell, Sir--and to you.
I shudder at the sequel, but I go.'
'Are you that Lady Psyche,' I rejoined,
'The fifth in line from that old Florian,
Yet hangs his portrait in my father's hall
(The gaunt old Baron with his beetle brow
Sun-shaded in the heat of dusty fights)
As he bestrode my Grandsire, when he fell,
And all else fled? we point to it, and we say,
The loyal warmth of Florian is not cold,
But branches current yet in kindred veins.'
'Are you that Psyche,' Florian added; 'she
With whom I sang about the morning hills,
Flung ball, flew kite, and raced the purple fly,
And snared the squirrel of the glen? are you
That Psyche, wont to bind my throbbing brow,
To smoothe my pillow, mix the foaming draught
Of fever, tell me pleasant tales, and read
My sickness down to happy dreams? are you
That brother-sister Psyche, both in one?
You were that Psyche, but what are you now?'
'You are that Psyche,' said Cyril, 'for whom
I would be that for ever which I seem,
731
Woman, if I might sit beside your feet,
And glean your scattered sapience.'
Then once more,
'Are you that Lady Psyche,' I began,
'That on her bridal morn before she past
From all her old companions, when the kind
Kissed her pale cheek, declared that ancient ties
Would still be dear beyond the southern hills;
That were there any of our people there
In want or peril, there was one to hear
And help them? look! for such are these and I.'
'Are you that Psyche,' Florian asked, 'to whom,
In gentler days, your arrow-wounded fawn
Came flying while you sat beside the well?
The creature laid his muzzle on your lap,
And sobbed, and you sobbed with it, and the blood
Was sprinkled on your kirtle, and you wept.
That was fawn's blood, not brother's, yet you wept.
O by the bright head of my little niece,
You were that Psyche, and what are you now?'
'You are that Psyche,' Cyril said again,
'The mother of the sweetest little maid,
That ever crowed for kisses.'
'Out upon it!'
She answered, 'peace! and why should I not play
The Spartan Mother with emotion, be
The Lucius Junius Brutus of my kind?
Him you call great: he for the common weal,
The fading politics of mortal Rome,
As I might slay this child, if good need were,
Slew both his sons: and I, shall I, on whom
The secular emancipation turns
Of half this world, be swerved from right to save
A prince, a brother? a little will I yield.
Best so, perchance, for us, and well for you.
O hard, when love and duty clash! I fear
My conscience will not count me fleckless; yet-Hear my conditions: promise (otherwise
You perish) as you came, to slip away
Today, tomorrow, soon: it shall be said,
These women were too barbarous, would not learn;
They fled, who might have shamed us: promise, all.'
732
What could we else, we promised each; and she,
Like some wild creature newly-caged, commenced
A to-and-fro, so pacing till she paused
By Florian; holding out her lily arms
Took both his hands, and smiling faintly said:
'I knew you at the first: though you have grown
You scarce have altered: I am sad and glad
To see you, Florian. ~I~ give thee to death
My brother! it was duty spoke, not I.
My needful seeming harshness, pardon it.
Our mother, is she well?'
With that she kissed
His forehead, then, a moment after, clung
About him, and betwixt them blossomed up
From out a common vein of memory
Sweet household talk, and phrases of the hearth,
And far allusion, till the gracious dews
Began to glisten and to fall: and while
They stood, so rapt, we gazing, came a voice,
'I brought a message here from Lady Blanche.'
Back started she, and turning round we saw
The Lady Blanche's daughter where she stood,
Melissa, with her hand upon the lock,
A rosy blonde, and in a college gown,
That clad her like an April daffodilly
(Her mother's colour) with her lips apart,
And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes,
As bottom agates seen to wave and float
In crystal currents of clear morning seas.
So stood that same fair creature at the door.
Then Lady Psyche, 'Ah--Melissa--you!
You heard us?' and Melissa, 'O pardon me
I heard, I could not help it, did not wish:
But, dearest Lady, pray you fear me not,
Nor think I bear that heart within my breast,
To give three gallant gentlemen to death.'
'I trust you,' said the other, 'for we two
Were always friends, none closer, elm and vine:
But yet your mother's jealous temperament-Let not your prudence, dearest, drowse, or prove
733
The Danaïd of a leaky vase, for fear
This whole foundation ruin, and I lose
My honour, these their lives.' 'Ah, fear me not'
Replied Melissa; 'no--I would not tell,
No, not for all Aspasia's cleverness,
No, not to answer, Madam, all those hard things
That Sheba came to ask of Solomon.'
'Be it so' the other, 'that we still may lead
The new light up, and culminate in peace,
For Solomon may come to Sheba yet.'
Said Cyril, 'Madam, he the wisest man
Feasted the woman wisest then, in halls
Of Lebanonian cedar: nor should you
(Though, Madam, ~you~ should answer, ~we~ would ask)
Less welcome find among us, if you came
Among us, debtors for our lives to you,
Myself for something more.' He said not what,
But 'Thanks,' she answered 'Go: we have been too long
Together: keep your hoods about the face;
They do so that affect abstraction here.
Speak little; mix not with the rest; and hold
Your promise: all, I trust, may yet be well.'
We turned to go, but Cyril took the child,
And held her round the knees against his waist,
And blew the swollen cheek of a trumpeter,
While Psyche watched them, smiling, and the child
Pushed her flat hand against his face and laughed;
And thus our conference closed.
And then we strolled
For half the day through stately theatres
Benched crescent-wise. In each we sat, we heard
The grave Professor. On the lecture slate
The circle rounded under female hands
With flawless demonstration: followed then
A classic lecture, rich in sentiment,
With scraps of thunderous Epic lilted out
By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies
And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever: then we dipt in all
That treats of whatsoever is, the state,
734
The total chronicles of man, the mind,
The morals, something of the frame, the rock,
The star, the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower,
Electric, chemic laws, and all the rest,
And whatsoever can be taught and known;
Till like three horses that have broken fence,
And glutted all night long breast-deep in corn,
We issued gorged with knowledge, and I spoke:
'Why, Sirs, they do all this as well as we.'
'They hunt old trails' said Cyril 'very well;
But when did woman ever yet invent?'
'Ungracious!' answered Florian; 'have you learnt
No more from Psyche's lecture, you that talked
The trash that made me sick, and almost sad?'
'O trash' he said, 'but with a kernel in it.
Should I not call her wise, who made me wise?
And learnt? I learnt more from her in a flash,
Than in my brainpan were an empty hull,
And every Muse tumbled a science in.
A thousand hearts lie fallow in these halls,
And round these halls a thousand baby loves
Fly twanging headless arrows at the hearts,
Whence follows many a vacant pang; but O
With me, Sir, entered in the bigger boy,
The Head of all the golden-shafted firm,
The long-limbed lad that had a Psyche too;
He cleft me through the stomacher; and now
What think you of it, Florian? do I chase
The substance or the shadow? will it hold?
I have no sorcerer's malison on me,
No ghostly hauntings like his Highness. I
Flatter myself that always everywhere
I know the substance when I see it. Well,
Are castles shadows? Three of them? Is she
The sweet proprietress a shadow? If not,
Shall those three castles patch my tattered coat?
For dear are those three castles to my wants,
And dear is sister Psyche to my heart,
And two dear things are one of double worth,
And much I might have said, but that my zone
Unmanned me: then the Doctors! O to hear
The Doctors! O to watch the thirsty plants
735
Imbibing! once or twice I thought to roar,
To break my chain, to shake my mane: but thou,
Modulate me, Soul of mincing mimicry!
Make liquid treble of that bassoon, my throat;
Abase those eyes that ever loved to meet
Star-sisters answering under crescent brows;
Abate the stride, which speaks of man, and loose
A flying charm of blushes o'er this cheek,
Where they like swallows coming out of time
Will wonder why they came: but hark the bell
For dinner, let us go!'
And in we streamed
Among the columns, pacing staid and still
By twos and threes, till all from end to end
With beauties every shade of brown and fair
In colours gayer than the morning mist,
The long hall glittered like a bed of flowers.
How might a man not wander from his wits
Pierced through with eyes, but that I kept mine own
Intent on her, who rapt in glorious dreams,
The second-sight of some Astræan age,
Sat compassed with professors: they, the while,
Discussed a doubt and tost it to and fro:
A clamour thickened, mixt with inmost terms
Of art and science: Lady Blanche alone
Of faded form and haughtiest lineaments,
With all her autumn tresses falsely brown,
Shot sidelong daggers at us, a tiger-cat
In act to spring.
At last a solemn grace
Concluded, and we sought the gardens: there
One walked reciting by herself, and one
In this hand held a volume as to read,
And smoothed a petted peacock down with that:
Some to a low song oared a shallop by,
Or under arches of the marble bridge
Hung, shadowed from the heat: some hid and sought
In the orange thickets: others tost a ball
Above the fountain-jets, and back again
With laughter: others lay about the lawns,
Of the older sort, and murmured that their May
Was passing: what was learning unto them?
736
They wished to marry; they could rule a house;
Men hated learned women: but we three
Sat muffled like the Fates; and often came
Melissa hitting all we saw with shafts
Of gentle satire, kin to charity,
That harmed not: then day droopt; the chapel bells
Called us: we left the walks; we mixt with those
Six hundred maidens clad in purest white,
Before two streams of light from wall to wall,
While the great organ almost burst his pipes,
Groaning for power, and rolling through the court
A long melodious thunder to the sound
Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies,
The work of Ida, to call down from Heaven
A blessing on her labours for the world.
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
927:IV - THE STUDY
FAUST MEPHISTOPHELES
FAUST
A knock? Come in! Again my quiet broken?
MEPHISTOPHELES
'Tis I!
FAUST
Come in!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Thrice must the words be spoken.
FAUST
Come in, then!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Thus thou pleasest me.
I hope we'll suit each other well;
For now, thy vapors to dispel,
I come, a squire of high degree,
In scarlet coat, with golden trimming,
A cloak in silken lustre swimming,
A tall cock's-feather in my hat,
A long, sharp sword for show or quarrel,
And I advise thee, brief and flat,
To don the self-same gay apparel,
That, from this den released, and free,
Life be at last revealed to thee!
FAUST
This life of earth, whatever my attire,
Would pain me in its wonted fashion.
Too old am I to play with passion;
Too young, to be without desire.
What from the world have I to gain?
Thou shalt abstainrenouncerefrain!
Such is the everlasting song
That in the ears of all men rings,
That unrelieved, our whole life long,
Each hour, in passing, hoarsely sings.
In very terror I at morn awake,
Upon the verge of bitter weeping,
To see the day of disappointment break,
To no one hope of minenot oneits promise keeping:
That even each joy's presentiment
With wilful cavil would diminish,
With grinning masks of life prevent
My mind its fairest work to finish!
Then, too, when night descends, how anxiously
Upon my couch of sleep I lay me:
There, also, comes no rest to me,
But some wild dream is sent to fray me.
The God that in my breast is owned
Can deeply stir the inner sources;
The God, above my powers enthroned,
He cannot change external forces.
So, by the burden of my days oppressed,
Death is desired, and Life a thing unblest!
MEPHISTOPHELES
And yet is never Death a wholly welcome guest.
FAUST
O fortunate, for whom, when victory glances,
The bloody laurels on the brow he bindeth!
Whom, after rapid, maddening dances,
In clasping maiden-arms he findeth!
O would that I, before that spirit-power,
Ravished and rapt from life, had sunken!
MEPHISTOPHELES
And yet, by some one, in that nightly hour,
A certain liquid was not drunken.
FAUST
Eavesdropping, ha! thy pleasure seems to be.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Omniscient am I not; yet much is known to me.
FAUST
Though some familiar tone, retrieving
My thoughts from torment, led me on,
And sweet, clear echoes came, deceiving
A faith bequea thed from Childhood's dawn,
Yet now I curse whate'er entices
And snares the soul with visions vain;
With dazzling cheats and dear devices
Confines it in this cave of pain!
Cursed be, at once, the high ambition
Wherewith the mind itself deludes!
Cursed be the glare of apparition
That on the finer sense intrudes!
Cursed be the lying dream's impression
Of name, and fame, and laurelled brow!
Cursed, all that flatters as possession,
As wife and child, as knave and plow!
Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures
To restless action spurs our fate!
Cursed when, for soft, indulgent leisures,
He lays for us the pillows straight!
Cursed be the vine's transcendent nectar,
The highest favor Love lets fall!
Cursed, also, Hope!cursed Faith, the spectre!
And cursed be Patience most of all!
CHORUS OF SPIRITS (invisible)
Woe! woe!
Thou hast it destroyed,
The beautiful world,
With powerful fist:
In ruin 'tis hurled,
By the blow of a demigod shattered!
The scattered
Fragments into the Void we carry,
Deploring
The beauty perished beyond restoring.
Mightier
For the children of men,
Brightlier
Build it again,
In thine own bosom build it anew!
Bid the new career
Commence,
With clearer sense,
And the new songs of cheer
Be sung thereto!
MEPHISTOPHELES
These are the small dependants
Who give me attendance.
Hear them, to deeds and passion
Counsel in shrewd old-fashion!
Into the world of strife,
Out of this lonely life
That of senses and sap has betrayed thee,
They would persuade thee.
This nursing of the pain forego thee,
That, like a vulture, feeds upon thy breast!
The worst society thou find'st will show thee
Thou art a man among the rest.
But 'tis not meant to thrust
Thee into the mob thou hatest!
I am not one of the greatest,
Yet, wilt thou to me entrust
Thy steps through life, I'll guide thee,
Will willingly walk beside thee,
Will serve thee at once and forever
With best endeavor,
And, if thou art satisfied,
Will as servant, slave, with thee abide.
FAUST
And what shall be my counter-service therefor?
MEPHISTOPHELES
The time is long: thou need'st not now insist.
FAUST
Nono! The Devil is an egotist,
And is not apt, without a why or wherefore,
"For God's sake," others to assist.
Speak thy conditions plain and clear!
With such a servant danger comes, I fear.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Here, an unwearied slave, I'll wear thy tether,
And to thine every nod obedient be:
When There again we come together,
Then shalt thou do the same for me.
FAUST
The There my scruples naught increases.
When thou hast dashed this world to pieces,
The other, then, its place may fill.
Here, on this earth, my pleasures have their sources;
Yon sun beholds my sorrows in his courses;
And when from these my life itself divorces,
Let happen all that can or will!
I'll hear no more: 'tis vain to ponder
If there we cherish love or hate,
Or, in the spheres we dream of yonder,
A High and Low our souls await.
MEPHISTOPHELES
In this sense, even, canst thou venture.
Come, bind thyself by prompt indenture,
And thou mine arts with joy shalt see:
What no man ever saw, I'll give to thee.
FAUST
Canst thou, poor Devil, give me whatsoever?
When was a human soul, in its supreme endeavor,
E'er understood by such as thou?
Yet, hast thou food which never satiates, now,
The restless, ruddy gold hast thou,
That runs, quicksilver-like, one's fingers through,
A game whose winnings no man ever knew,
A maid that, even from my breast,
Beckons my neighbor with her wanton glances,
And Honor's godlike zest,
The meteor that a moment dances,
Show me the fruits that, ere they're gathered, rot,
And trees that daily with new leafage clo the them!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Such a demand alarms me not:
Such treasures have I, and can show them.
But still the time may reach us, good my friend.
When peace we crave and more luxurious diet.
FAUST
When on an idler's bed I stretch myself in quiet.
There let, at once, my record end!
Canst thou with lying flattery rule me,
Until, self-pleased, myself I see,
Canst thou with rich enjoyment fool me,
Let that day be the last for me!
The bet I offer.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Done!
FAUST
And heartily!
When thus I hail the Moment flying:
"Ah, still delaythou art so fair!"
Then bind me in thy bonds undying,
My final ruin then declare!
Then let the death-bell chime the token.
Then art thou from thy service free!
The clock may stop, the hand be broken,
Then Time be finished unto me!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Consider well: my memory good is rated.
FAUST
Thou hast a perfect right thereto.
My powers I have not rashly estimated:
A slave am I, whate'er I do
If thine, or whose? 'tis needless to debate it.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Then at the Doctors'-banquet I, to-day,
Will as a servant wait behind thee.
But one thing more! Beyond all risk to bind thee,
Give me a line or two, I pray.
FAUST
Demand'st thou, Pedant, too, a document?
Hast never known a man, nor proved his word's intent?
Is't not enough, that what I speak to-day
Shall stand, with all my future days agreeing?
In all its tides sweeps not the world away,
And shall a promise bind my being?
Yet this delusion in our hearts we bear:
Who would himself therefrom deliver?
Blest he, whose bosom Truth makes pure and fair!
No sacrifice shall he repent of ever.
Nathless a parchment, writ and stamped with care,
A spectre is, which all to shun endeavor.
The word, alas! dies even in the pen,
And wax and leather keep the lordship then.
What wilt from me, Base Spirit, say?
Brass, marble, parchment, paper, clay?
The terms with graver, quill, or chisel, stated?
I freely leave the choice to thee.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Why heat thyself, thus instantly,
With eloquence exaggerated?
Each leaf for such a pact is good;
And to subscribe thy name thou'lt take a drop of blood.
FAUST
If thou therewith art fully satisfied,
So let us by the farce abide.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Blood is a juice of rarest quality.
FAUST
Fear not that I this pact shall seek to sever?
The promise that I make to thee
Is just the sum of my endeavor.
I have myself inflated all too high;
My proper place is thy estate:
The Mighty Spirit deigns me no reply,
And Nature shuts on me her gate.
The thread of Thought at last is broken,
And knowledge brings disgust unspoken.
Let us the sensual deeps explore,
To quench the fervors of glowing passion!
Let every marvel take form and fashion
Through the impervious veil it wore!
Plunge we in Time's tumultuous dance,
In the rush and roll of Circumstance!
Then may delight and distress,
And worry and success,
Alternately follow, as best they can:
Restless activity proves the man!
MEPHISTOPHELES
For you no bound, no term is set.
Whether you everywhere be trying,
Or snatch a rapid bliss in flying,
May it agree with you, what you get!
Only fall to, and show no timid balking.
FAUST
But thou hast heard, 'tis not of joy we're talking.
I take the wildering whirl, enjoyment's keenest pain,
Enamored hate, exhilarant disdain.
My bosom, of its thirst for knowledge sated,
Shall not, henceforth, from any pang be wrested,
And all of life for all mankind created
Shall be within mine inmost being tested:
The highest, lowest forms my soul shall borrow,
Shall heap upon itself their bliss and sorrow,
And thus, my own sole self to all their selves expanded,
I too, at last, shall with them all be stranded!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Believe me, who for many a thousand year
The same tough meat have chewed and tested,
That from the cradle to the bier
No man the ancient leaven has digested!
Trust one of us, this Whole supernal
Is made but for a God's delight!
He dwells in splendor single and eternal,
But us he thrusts in darkness, out of sight,
And you he dowers with Day and Night.
FAUST
Nay, but I will!
MEPHISTOPHELES
A good reply!
One only fear still needs repeating:
The art is long, the time is fleeting.
Then let thyself be taught, say I!
Go, league thyself with a poet,
Give the rein to his imagination,
Then wear the crown, and show it,
Of the qualities of his creation,
The courage of the lion's breed,
The wild stag's speed,
The Italian's fiery blood,
The North's firm fortitude!
Let him find for thee the secret tether
That binds the Noble and Mean together.
And teach thy pulses of youth and pleasure
To love by rule, and hate by measure!
I'd like, myself, such a one to see:
Sir Microcosm his name should be.
FAUST
What am I, then, if 'tis denied my part
The crown of all humanity to win me,
Whereto yearns every sense within me?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Why, on the whole, thou'rtwhat thou art.
Set wigs of million curls upon thy head, to raise thee,
Wear shoes an ell in height,the truth betrays thee,
And thou remainestwhat thou art.
FAUST
I feel, indeed, that I have made the treasure
Of human thought and knowledge mine, in vain;
And if I now sit down in restful leisure,
No fount of newer strength is in my brain:
I am no hair's-breadth more in height,
Nor nearer, to the Infinite,
MEPHISTOPHELES
Good Sir, you see the facts precisely
As they are seen by each and all.
We must arrange them now, more wisely,
Before the joys of life shall pall.
Why, Zounds! Both hands and feet are, truly
And head and virile forcesthine:
Yet all that I indulge in newly,
Is't thence less wholly mine?
If I've six stallions in my stall,
Are not their forces also lent me?
I speed along, completest man of all,
As though my legs were four-and-twenty.
Take hold, then! let reflection rest,
And plunge into the world with zest!
I say to thee, a speculative wight
Is like a beast on moorlands lean,
That round and round some fiend misleads to evil plight,
While all about lie pastures fresh and green.
FAUST
Then how shall we begin?
MEPHISTOPHELES
We'll try a wider sphere.
What place of martyrdom is here!
Is't life, I ask, is't even prudence,
To bore thyself and bore the students?
Let Neighbor Paunch to that attend!
Why plague thyself with threshing straw forever?
The best thou learnest, in the end
Thou dar'st not tell the youngstersnever!
I hear one's footsteps, hither steering.
FAUST
To see him now I have no heart.
MEPHISTOPHELES
So long the poor boy waits a hearing,
He must not unconsoled depart.
Thy cap and mantle straightway lend me!
I'll play the comedy with art.
(He disguises himself.)
My wits, be certain, will befriend me.
But fifteen minutes' time is all I need;
For our fine trip, meanwhile, prepare thyself with speed!
[Exit FAUST.
MEPHISTOPHELES
(In FAUST'S long mantle.)
Reason and Knowledge only thou despise,
The highest strength in man that lies!
Let but the Lying Spirit bind thee
With magic works and shows that blind thee,
And I shall have thee fast and sure!
Fate such a bold, untrammelled spirit gave him,
As forwards, onwards, ever must endure;
Whose over-hasty impulse drave him
Past earthly joys he might secure.
Dragged through the wildest life, will I enslave him,
Through flat and stale indifference;
With struggling, chilling, checking, so deprave him
That, to his hot, insatiate sense,
The dream of drink shall mock, but never lave him:
Refreshment shall his lips in vain implore
Had he not made himself the Devil's, naught could save him,
Still were he lost forevermore!
(A STUDENT enters.)
STUDENT
A short time, only, am I here,
And come, devoted and sincere,
To greet and know the man of fame,
Whom men to me with reverence name.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Your courtesy doth flatter me:
You see a man, as others be.
Have you, perchance, elsewhere begun?
STUDENT
Receive me now, I pray, as one
Who comes to you with courage good,
Somewhat of cash, and healthy blood:
My mother was hardly willing to let me;
But knowledge worth having I fain would get me.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Then you have reached the right place now.
STUDENT
I'd like to leave it, I must avow;
I find these walls, these vaulted spaces
Are anything but pleasant places.
Tis all so cramped and close and mean;
One sees no tree, no glimpse of green,
And when the lecture-halls receive me,
Seeing, hearing, and thinking leave me.
MEPHISTOPHELES
All that depends on habitude.
So from its mother's breasts a child
At first, reluctant, takes its food,
But soon to seek them is beguiled.
Thus, at the breasts of Wisdom clinging,
Thou'lt find each day a greater rapture bringing.
STUDENT
I'll hang thereon with joy, and freely drain them;
But tell me, pray, the proper means to gain them.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Explain, before you further speak,
The special faculty you seek.
STUDENT
I crave the highest erudition;
And fain would make my acquisition
All that there is in Earth and Heaven,
In Nature and in Science too.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Here is the genuine path for you;
Yet strict attention must be given.
STUDENT
Body and soul thereon I'll wreak;
Yet, truly, I've some inclination
On summer holidays to seek
A little freedom and recreation.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Use well your time! It flies so swiftly from us;
But time through order may be won, I promise.
So, Friend (my views to briefly sum),
First, the collegium logicum.
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots 'twere laced,
And thus, to graver paces brought,
'Twill plod along the path of thought,
Instead of shooting here and there,
A will-o'-the-wisp in murky air.
Days will be spent to bid you know,
What once you did at a single blow,
Like eating and drinking, free and strong,
That one, two, three! thereto belong.
Truly the fabric of mental fleece
Resembles a weaver's masterpiece,
Where a thousand threads one treadle throws,
Where fly the shuttles hither and thither.
Unseen the threads are knit together.
And an infinite combination grows.
Then, the philosopher steps in
And shows, no otherwise it could have been:
The first was so, the second so,
Therefore the third and fourth are so;
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been.
The scholars are everywhere believers,
But never succeed in being weavers.
He who would study organic existence,
First drives out the soul with rigid persistence;
Then the parts in his hand he may hold and class,
But the spiritual link is lost, alas!
Encheiresin natures, this Chemistry names,
Nor knows how herself she banters and blames!
STUDENT
I cannot understand you quite.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Your mind will shortly be set aright,
When you have learned, all things reducing,
To classify them for your using.
STUDENT
I feel as stupid, from all you've said,
As if a mill-wheel whirled in my head!
MEPHISTOPHELES
And afterfirst and foremost dutyOf
Metaphysics learn the use and beauty!
See that you most profoundly gain
What does not suit the human brain!
A splendid word to serve, you'll find
For what goes inor won't go inyour mind.
But first, at least this half a year,
To order rigidly adhere;
Five hours a day, you understand,
And when the clock strikes, be on hand!
Prepare beforeh and for your part
With paragraphs all got by heart,
So you can better watch, and look
That naught is said but what is in the book:
Yet in thy writing as unwearied be,
As did the Holy Ghost dictate to thee!
STUDENT
No need to tell me twice to do it!
I think, how useful 'tis to write;
For what one has, in black and white,
One carries home and then goes through it.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Yet choose thyself a faculty!
STUDENT
I cannot reconcile myself to Jurisprudence.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Nor can I therefore greatly blame you students:
I know what science this has come to be.
All rights and laws are still transmitted
Like an eternal sickness of the race,
From generation unto generation fitted,
And shifted round from place to place.
Reason becomes a sham, Beneficence a worry:
Thou art a grandchild, therefore woe to thee!
The right born with us, ours in verity,
This to consider, there's, alas! no hurry.
STUDENT
My own disgust is streng thened by your speech:
O lucky he, whom you shall teach!
I've almost for Theology decided.
MEPHISTOPHELES
I should not wish to see you here misguided:
For, as regards this science, let me hint
'Tis very hard to shun the false direction;
There's so much secret poison lurking in 't,
So like the medicine, it baffles your detection.
Hear, therefore, one alone, for that is best, in sooth,
And simply take your master's words for truth.
On words let your attention centre!
Then through the safest gate you'll enter
The temple-halls of Certainty.
STUDENT
Yet in the word must some idea be.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Of course! But only shun too over-sharp a tension,
For just where fails the comprehension,
A word steps promptly in as deputy.
With words 'tis excellent disputing;
Systems to words 'tis easy suiting;
On words 'tis excellent believing;
No word can ever lose a jot from thieving.
STUDENT
Pardon! With many questions I detain you.
Yet must I trouble you again.
Of Medicine I still would fain
Hear one strong word that might explain you.
Three years is but a little space.
And, God! who can the field embrace?
If one some index could be shown,
'Twere easier groping forward, truly.
MEPHISTOPHELES (aside)
I'm tired enough of this dry tone,
Must play the Devil again, and fully.
(Aloud)
To grasp the spirit of Medicine is easy:
Learn of the great and little world your fill,
To let it go at last, so please ye,
Just as God will!
In vain that through the realms of science you may drift;
Each one learns onlyjust what learn he can:
Yet he who grasps the Moment's gift,
He is the proper man.
Well-made you are, 'tis not to be denied,
The rest a bold address will win you;
If you but in yourself confide,
At once confide all others in you.
To lead the women, learn the special feeling!
Their everlasting aches and groans,
In thousand tones,
Have all one source, one mode of healing;
And if your acts are half discreet,
You'll always have them at your feet.
A title first must draw and interest them,
And show that yours all other arts exceeds;
Then, as a greeting, you are free to touch and test them,
While, thus to do, for years another pleads.
You press and count the pulse's dances,
And then, with burning sidelong glances,
You clasp the swelling hips, to see
If tightly laced her corsets be.
STUDENT
That's better, now! The How and Where, one sees.
MEPHISTOPHELES
My worthy friend, gray are all theories,
And green alone Life's golden tree.
STUDENT
I swear to you, 'tis like a dream to me.
Might I again presume, with trust unbounded,
To hear your wisdom thoroughly expounded?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Most willingly, to what extent I may.
STUDENT
I cannot really go away:
Allow me that my album first I reach you,
Grant me this favor, I beseech you!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Assuredly.
(He writes, and returns the book.)
STUDENT (reads)
Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum.
(Closes the book with reverence, and withdraws)
MEPHISTOPHELES
Follow the ancient text, and the snake thou wast ordered to trample!
With all thy likeness to God, thou'lt yet be a sorry example!
(FAUST enters.)
FAUST
Now, whither shall we go?
MEPHISTOPHELES
As best it pleases thee.
The little world, and then the great, we'll see.
With what delight, what profit winning,
Shalt thou sponge through the term beginning!
FAUST
Yet with the flowing beard I wear,
Both ease and grace will fail me there.
The attempt, indeed, were a futile strife;
I never could learn the ways of life.
I feel so small before others, and thence
Should always find embarrassments.
MEPHISTOPHELES
My friend, thou soon shalt lose all such misgiving:
Be thou but self-possessed, thou hast the art of living!
FAUST
How shall we leave the house, and start?
Where hast thou servant, coach and horses?
MEPHISTOPHELES
We'll spread this cloak with proper art,
Then through the air direct our courses.
But only, on so bold a flight,
Be sure to have thy luggage light.
A little burning air, which I shall soon prepare us,
Above the earth will nimbly bear us,
And, if we're light, we'll travel swift and clear:
I gratulate thee on thy new career!
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, THE STUDY (The Compact)
,#NFDB
928:Scene. Colmar in Alsatia: an Inn. 1528.
Paracelsus, Festus.
Paracelsus
[to Johannes Oporinus, his Secretary].
Sic itur ad astra! Dear Von Visenburg
Is scandalized, and poor Torinus paralysed,
And every honest soul that Basil holds
Aghast; and yet we live, as one may say,
Just as though Liechtenfels had never set
So true a value on his sorry carcass,
And learned Ptter had not frowned us dumb.
We live; and shall as surely start to morrow
For Nuremberg, as we drink speedy scathe
To Basil in this mantling wine, suffused
A delicate blush, no fainter tinge is born
I' the shut heart of a bud. Pledge me, good John
"Basil; a hot plague ravage it, and Ptter
"Oppose the plague!" Even so? Do you too share
Their panic, the reptiles? Ha, ha; faint through these,
Desist for these! They manage matters so
At Basil, 't is like: but others may find means
To bring the stoutest braggart of the tribe
Once more to crouch in silencemeans to breed
A stupid wonder in each fool again,
Now big with admiration at the skill
Which stript a vain pretender of his plumes:
And, that done,means to brand each slavish brow
So deeply, surely, ineffaceably,
That henceforth flattery shall not pucker it
Out of the furrow; there that stamp shall stay
To show the next they fawn on, what they are,
This Basil with its magnates,fill my cup,
Whom I curse soul and limb. And now despatch,
Despatch, my trusty John; and what remains
To do, whate'er arrangements for our trip
Are yet to be completed, see you hasten
This night; we'll weather the storm at least: to-morrow
For Nuremberg! Now leave us; this grave clerk
Has divers weighty matters for my ear:
[Oporinus goes out.
And spare my lungs. At last, my gallant Festus,
I am rid of this arch-knave that dogs my heels
As a gaunt crow a gasping sheep; at last
May give a loose to my delight. How kind,
How very kind, my first best only friend!
Why, this looks like fidelity. Embrace me!
Not a hair silvered yet? Right! you shall live
Till I am worth your love; you shall be pround,
And Ibut let time show! Did you not wonder?
I sent to you because our compact weighed
Upon my conscience(you recall the night
At Basil, which the gods confound!)because
Once more I aspire. I call you to my side:
You come. You thought my message strange?
Festus.
So strange
That I must hope, indeed, your messenger
Has mingled his own fancies with the words
Purporting to be yours.
Paracelsus.
He said no more,
'T is probable, than the precious folk I leave
Said fiftyfold more roughly. Well-a-day,
'T is true! poor Paracelsus is exposed
At last; a most egregious quack he proves:
And those he overreached must spit their hate
On one who, utterly beneath contempt,
Could yet deceive their topping wits. You heard
Bare truth; and at my bidding you come here
To speed me on my enterprise, as once
Your lavish wishes sped me, my own friend!
Festus.
What is your purpose, Aureole?
Paracelsus.
Oh, for purpose,
There is no lack of precedents in a case
Like mine; at least, if not precisely mine,
The case of men cast off by those they sought
To benefit.
Festus.
They really cast you off?
I only heard a vague tale of some priest,
Cured by your skill, who wrangled at your claim,
Knowing his life's worth best; and how the judge
The matter was referred to, saw no cause
To interfere, nor you to hide your full
Contempt of him; nor he, again, to smother
His wrath thereat, which raised so fierce a flame
That Basil soon was made no place for you.
Paracelsus.
The affair of Liechtenfels? the shallowest fable,
The last and silliest outragemere pretence!
I knew it, I foretold it from the first,
How soon the stupid wonder you mistook
For genuine loyaltya cheering promise
Of better things to comewould pall and pass;
And every word comes true. Saul is among
The prophets! Just so long as I was pleased
To play off the mere antics of my art,
Fantastic gambols leading to no end,
I got huge praise: but one can ne'er keep down
Our foolish nature's weakness. There they flocked,
Poor devils, jostling, swearing and perspiring,
Till the walls rang again; and all for me!
I had a kindness for them, which was right;
But then I stopped not till I tacked to that
A trust in them and a respecta sort
Of sympathy for them; I must needs begin
To teach them, not amaze them, "to impart
"The spirit which should instigate the search
"Of truth," just what you bade me! I spoke out.
Forthwith a mighty squadron, in disgust,
Filed off"the sifted chaff of the sack," I said,
Redoubling my endeavours to secure
The rest. When lo! one man had tarried so long
Only to ascertain if I supported
This tenet of his, or that; another loved
To hear impartially before he judged,
And having heard, now judged; this bland disciple
Passed for my dupe, but all along, it seems,
Spied error where his neighbours marvelled most;
That fiery doctor who had hailed me friend,
Did it because my by-paths, once proved wrong
And beaconed properly, would commend again
The good old ways our sires jogged safely o'er,
Though not their squeamish sons; the other worthy
Discovered divers verses of St. John,
Which, read successively, refreshed the soul,
But, muttered backwards, cured the gout, the stone,
The colic and what not. Quid multa? The end
Was a clear class-room, and a quiet leer
From grave folk, and a sour reproachful glance
From those in chief who, cap in hand, installed
The new professor scarce a year before;
And a vast flourish about patient merit
Obscured awhile by flashy tricks, but sure
Sooner or later to emerge in splendour
Of which the example was some luckless wight
Whom my arrival had discomfited,
But now, it seems, the general voice recalled
To fill my chair and so efface the stain
Basil had long incurred. I sought no better,
Only a quiet dismissal from my post,
And from my heart I wished them better suited
And better served. Good night to Basil, then!
But fast as I proposed to rid the tribe
Of my obnoxious back, I could not spare them
The pleasure of a parting kick.
Festus.
You smile:
Despise them as they merit!
Paracelsus.
If I smile,
'T is with as very contempt as ever turned
Flesh into stone. This courteous recompense,
This grateful . . . Festus, were your nature fit
To be defiled, your eyes the eyes to ache
At gangrene-blotches, eating poison-blains,
The ulcerous barky scurf of leprosy
Which findsa man, and leavesa hideous thing
That cannot but be mended by hell fire,
I would lay bare to you the human heart
Which God cursed long ago, and devils make since
Their pet nest and their never-tiring home.
Oh, sages have discovered we are born
For various endsto love, to know: has ever
One stumbled, in his search, on any signs
Of a nature in us formed to hate? To hate?
If that be our true object which evokes
Our powers in fullest strength, be sure 't is hate!
Yet men have doubted if the best and bravest
Of spirits can nourish him with hate alone.
I had not the monopoly of fools,
It seems, at Basil.
Festus.
But your plans, your plans!
I have yet to learn your purpose, Aureole!
Paracelsus.
Whether to sink beneath such ponderous shame,
To shrink up like a crushed snail, undergo
In silence and desist from further toil,
and so subside into a monument
Of one their censure blasted? or to bow
Cheerfully as submissively, to lower
My old pretensions even as Basil dictates,
To drop into the rank her wits assign me
And live as they prescribe, and make that use
Of my poor knowledge which their rules allow,
Proud to be patted now and then, and careful
To practise the true posture for receiving
The amplest benefit from their hoofs' appliance
When they shall condescend to tutor me?
Then, one may feel resentment like a flame
Within, and deck false systems in truth's garb,
And tangle and entwine mankind with error,
And give them darkness for a dower and falsehood
For a possession, ages: or one may mope
Into a shade through thinking, or else drowse
Into a dreamless sleep and so die off.
But I,now Festus shall divine!but I
Am merely setting out once more, embracing
My earliest aims again! What thinks he now?
Festus.
Your aims? the aims?to Know? and where is found
The early trust . . .
Paracelsus.
Nay, not so fast; I say,
The aimsnot the old means. You know they made me
A laughing-stock; I was a fool; you know
The when and the how: hardly those means again!
Not but they had their beauty; who should know
Their passing beauty, if not I? Still, dreams
They were, so let them vanish, yet in beauty
If that may be. Stay: thus they pass in song!
[He sings.
Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair: such balsam falls
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island-gain.
And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead, was young.
Mine, every word! And on such pile shall die
My lovely fancies, with fair perished things,
Themselves fair and forgotten; yes, forgotten,
Or why abjure them? So, I made this rhyme
That fitting dignity might be preserved;
No little proud was I; though the list of drugs
Smacks of my old vocation, and the verse
Halts like the best of Luther's psalms.
Festus.
But, Aureole,
Talk not thus wildly and madly. I am here
Did you know all! I have travelled far, indeed,
To learn your wishes. Be yourself again!
For in this mood I recognize you less
Than in the horrible despondency
I witnessed last. You may account this, joy;
But rather let me gaze on that despair
Than hear these incoherent words and see
This flushed cheek and intensely-sparkling eye.
Paracelsus.
Why, man, I was light-hearted in my prime
I am light-hearted now; what would you have?
Aprile was a poet, I make songs
'T is the very augury of success I want!
Why should I not be joyous now as then?
Festus.
Joyous! and how? and what remains for joy?
You have declared the ends (which I am sick
Of naming) are impracticable.
Paracelsus.
Ay,
Pursued as I pursued themthe arch-fool!
Listen: my plan will please you not, 't is like,
But you are little versed in the world's ways.
This is my plan(first drinking its good luck)
I will accept all helps; all I despised
So rashly at the outset, equally
With early impulses, late years have quenched:
I have tried each way singly: now for both!
All helps! no one sort shall exclude the rest.
I seek to know and to enjoy at once,
Not one without the other as before.
Suppose my labour should seem God's own cause
Once more, as first I dreamed,it shall not baulk me
Of the meanest earthliest sensualest delight
That may be snatched; for every joy is gain,
And gain is gain, however small. My soul
Can die then, nor be taunted"what was gained?"
Nor, on the other hand, should pleasure follow
As though I had not spurned her hitherto,
Shall she o'ercloud my spirit's rapt communion
With the tumultuous past, the teeming future,
Glorious with visions of a full success.
Festus.
Success!
Paracelsus.
And wherefore not? Why not prefer
Results obtained in my best state of being,
To those derived alone from seasons dark
As the thoughts they bred? When I was best, my youth
Unwasted, seemed success not surest too?
It is the nature of darkness to obscure.
I am a wanderer: I remember well
One journey, how I feared the track was missed,
So long the city I desired to reach
Lay hid; when suddenly its spires afar
Flashed through the circling clouds; you may conceive
My transport. Soon the vapours closed again,
But I had seen the city, and one such glance
No darkness could obscure: nor shall the present
A few dull hours, a passing shame or two,
Destroy the vivid memories of the past.
I will fight the battle out; a little spent
Perhaps, but still an able combatant.
You look at my grey hair and furrowed brow?
But I can turn even weakness to account:
Of many tricks I know, 't is not the least
To push the ruins of my frame, whereon
The fire of vigour trembles scarce alive,
Into a heap, and send the flame aloft.
What should I do with age? So, sickness lends
An aid; it being, I fear, the source of all
We boast of: mind is nothing but disease,
And natural health is ignorance.
Festus.
I see
But one good symptom in this notable scheme.
I feared your sudden journey had in view
To wreak immediate vengeance on your foes
'T is not so: I am glad.
Paracelsus.
And if I please
To spit on them, to trample them, what then?
'T is sorry warfare truly, but the fools
Provoke it. I would spare their self-conceit
But if they must provoke me, cannot suffer
Forbearance on my part, if I may keep
No quality in the shade, must needs put forth
Power to match power, my strength against their strength,
And teach them their own game with their own arms
Why, be it so and let them take their chance!
I am above them like a god, there's no
Hiding the fact: what idle scruples, then,
Were those that ever bade me soften it,
Communicate it gently to the world,
Instead of proving my supremacy,
Taking my natural station o'er their head,
Then owning all the glory was a man's!
And in my elevation man's would be.
But live and learn, though life's short, learning, hard!
And therefore, though the wreck of my past self,
I fear, dear Ptter, that your lecture-room
Must wait awhile for its best ornament,
The penitent empiric, who set up
For somebody, but soon was taught his place;
Now, but too happy to be let confess
His error, snuff the candles, and illustrate
(Fiat experientia corpore vili)
Your medicine's soundness in his person. Wait,
Good Ptter!
Festus.
He who sneers thus, is a god!
Paracelsus.
Ay, ay, laugh at me! I am very glad
You are not gulled by all this swaggering; you
Can see the root of the matter!how I strive
To put a good face on the overthrow
I have experienced, and to bury and hide
My degradation in its length and breadth;
How the mean motives I would make you think
Just mingle as is due with nobler aims,
The appetites I modestly allow
May influence me as being mortal still
Do goad me, drive me on, and fast supplant
My youth's desires. You are no stupid dupe:
You find me out! Yes, I had sent for you
To palm these childish lies upon you, Festus!
Laughyou shall laugh at me!
Festus.
The past, then, Aureole,
Proves nothing? Is our interchange of love
Yet to begin? Have I to swear I mean
No flattery in this speech or that? For you,
Whate'er you say, there is no degradation;
These low thoughts are no inmates of your mind,
Or wherefore this disorder? You are vexed
As much by the intrusion of base views,
Familiar to your adversaries, as they
Were troubled should your qualities alight
Amid their murky souls; not otherwise,
A stray wolf which the winter forces down
From our bleak hills, suffices to affright
A village in the valeswhile foresters
Sleep calm, though all night long the famished troop
Snuff round and scratch against their crazy huts.
These evil thoughts are monsters, and will flee.
Paracelsus.
May you be happy, Festus, my own friend!
Festus.
Nay, further; the delights you fain would think
The superseders of your nobler aims,
Though ordinary and harmless stimulants,
Will ne'er content you. . . .
Paracelsus.
Hush! I once despised them,
But that soon passes. We are high at first
In our demand, nor will abate a jot
Of toil's strict value; but time passes o'er,
And humbler spirits accept what we refuse:
In short, when some such comfort is doled out
As these delights, we cannot long retain
Bitter contempt which urges us at first
To hurl it back, but hug it to our breast
And thankfully retire. This life of mine
Must be lived out and a grave thoroughly earned:
I am just fit for that and nought beside.
I told you once, I cannot now enjoy,
Unless I deem my knowledge gains through joy;
Nor can I know, but straight warm tears reveal
My need of linking also joy to knowledge:
So, on I drive, enjoying all I can,
And knowing all I can. I speak, of course,
Confusedly; this will better explainfeel here!
Quick beating, is it not?a fire of the heart
To work off some way, this as well as any.
So, Festus sees me fairly launched; his calm
Compassionate look might have disturbed me once,
But now, far from rejecting, I invite
What bids me press the closer, lay myself
Open before him, and be soothed with pity;
I hope, if he command hope, and believe
As he directs mesatiating myself
With his enduring love. And Festus quits me
To give place to some credulous disciple
Who holds that God is wise, but Paracelsus
Has his peculiar merits: I suck in
That homage, chuckle o'er that admiration,
And then dismiss the fool; for night is come.
And I betake myself to study again,
Till patient searchings after hidden lore
Half wring some bright truth from its prison; my frame
Trembles, my forehead's veins swell out, my hair
Tingles for triumph. Slow and sure the morn
Shall break on my pent room and dwindling lamp
And furnace dead, and scattered earths and ores;
When, with a failing heart and throbbing brow,
I must review my captured truth, sum up
Its value, trace what ends to what begins,
Its present power with its eventual bearings,
Latent affinities, the views it opens,
And its full length in perfecting my scheme.
I view it sternly circumscribed, cast down
From the high place my fond hopes yielded it,
Proved worthlesswhich, in getting, yet had cost
Another wrench to this fast-falling frame.
Then, quick, the cup to quaff, that chases sorrow!
I lapse back into youth, and take again
My fluttering pulse for evidence that God
Means good to me, will make my cause his own.
See! I have cast off this remorseless care
Which clogged a spirit born to soar so free,
And my dim chamber has become a tent,
Festus is sitting by me, and his Michal . . .
Why do you start? I say, she listening here,
(For yonderWrzburg through the orchard-bough!)
Motions as though such ardent words should find
No echo in a maiden's quiet soul,
But her pure bosom heaves, her eyes fill fast
With tears, her sweet lips tremble all the while!
Ha, ha!
Festus.
It seems, then, you expect to reap
No unreal joy from this your present course,
But rather . . .
Paracelsus.
Death! To die! I owe that much
To what, at least, I was. I should be sad
To live contented after such a fall,
To thrive and fatten after such reverse!
The whole plan is a makeshift, but will last
My time.
Festus.
And you have never mused and said,
"I had a noble purpose, and the strength
"To compass it; but I have stopped half-way,
"And wrongly given the first-fruits of my toil
"To objects little worthy of the gift.
"Why linger round them still? why clench my fault?
"Why seek for consolation in defeat,
"In vain endeavours to derive a beauty
"From ugliness? why seek to make the most
"Of what no power can change, nor strive instead
"With mighty effort to redeem the past
"And, gathering up the treasures thus cast down,
"To hold a steadfast course till I arrive
"At their fit destination and my own?"
You have never pondered thus?
Paracelsus.
Have I, you ask?
Often at midnight, when most fancies come,
Would some such airy project visit me:
But ever at the end . . . or will you hear
The same thing in a tale, a parable?
You and I, wandering over the world wide,
Chance to set foot upon a desert coast.
Just as we cry, "No human voice before
"Broke the inveterate silence of these rocks!"
Their querulous echo startles us; we turn:
What ravaged structure still looks o'er the sea?
Some characters remain, too! While we read,
The sharp salt wind, impatient for the last
Of even this record, wistfully comes and goes,
Or sings what we recover, mocking it.
This is the record; and my voice, the wind's.
[He sings.
Over the sea our galleys went,
With cleaving prows in order brave
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,
A gallant armament:
Each bark built out of a forest-tree
Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
And nailed all over the gaping sides,
Within and without, with black bull-hides,
Seethed in fat and suppled in flame,
To bear the playful billows' game:
So, each good ship was rude to see,
Rude and bare to the outward view,
But each upbore a stately tent
Where cedar pales in scented row
Kept out the flakes of the dancing brine,
And an awning drooped the mast below,
In fold on fold of the purple fine,
That neither noontide nor starshine
Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad,
Might pierce the regal tenement.
When the sun dawned, oh, gay and glad
We set the sail and plied the oar;
But when the night-wind blew like breath,
For joy of one day's voyage more,
We sang together on the wide sea,
Like men at peace on a peaceful shore;
Each sail was loosed to the wind so free,
Each helm made sure by the twilight star,
And in a sleep as calm as death,
We, the voyagers from afar,
Lay stretched along, each weary crew
In a circle round its wondrous tent
Whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent,
And with light and perfume, music too:
So the stars wheeled round, and the darkness past,
And at morn we started beside the mast,
And still each ship was sailing fast.
Now, one morn, land appeareda speck
Dim trembling betwixt sea and sky:
"Avoid it," cried our pilot, "check
"The shout, restrain the eager eye!"
But the heaving sea was black behind
For many a night and many a day,
And land, though but a rock, drew nigh;
So, we broke the cedar pales away,
Let the purple awning flap in the wind,
And a statute bright was on every deck!
We shouted, every man of us,
And steered right into the harbour thus,
With pomp and pan glorious.
A hundred shapes of lucid stone!
All day we built its shrine for each,
A shrine of rock for every one,
Nor paused till in the westering sun
We sat together on the beach
To sing because our task was done.
When lo! what shouts and merry songs!
What laughter all the distance stirs!
A loaded raft with happy throngs
Of gentle islanders!
"Our isles are just at hand," they cried,
"Like cloudlets faint in even sleeping
"Our temple-gates are opened wide,
"Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping
"For these majestic forms"they cried.
Oh, then we awoke with sudden start
From our deep dream, and knew, too late,
How bare the rock, how desolate,
Which had received our precious freight:
Yet we called out"Depart!
"Our gifts, once given, must here abide.
"Our work is done; we have no heart
"To mar our work,"we cried.
Festus.
In truth?
Paracelsus.
Nay, wait: all this in tracings faint
On rugged stones strewn here and there, but piled
In order once: then followsmark what follows!
"The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
"To their first fault, and withered in their pride."
Festus.
Come back then, Aureole; as you fear God, come!
This is foul sin; come back! Renounce the past,
Forswear the future; look for joy no more,
But wait death's summons amid holy sights,
And trust me for the eventpeace, if not joy.
Return with me to Einsiedeln, dear Aureole!
Paracelsus.
No way, no way! it would not turn to good.
A spotless child sleeps on the flowering moss
'T is well for him; but when a sinful man,
Envying such slumber, may desire to put
His guilt away, shall he return at once
To rest by lying there? Our sires knew well
(Spite of the grave discoveries of their sons)
The fitting course for such: dark cells, dim lamps,
A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm:
No mossy pillow blue with violets!
Festus.
I see no symptom of these absolute
And tyrannous passions. You are calmer now.
This verse-making can purge you well enough
Without the terrible penance you describe.
You love me still: the lusts you fear will never
Outrage your friend. To Einsiedeln, once more!
Say but the word!
Paracelsus.
No, no; those lusts forbid:
They crouch, I know, cowering with half-shut eye
Beside you; 't is their nature. Thrust yourself
Between them and their prey; let some fool style me
Or king or quack, it matters notthen try
Your wisdom, urge them to forego their treat!
No, no; learn better and look deeper, Festus!
If you knew how a devil sneers within me
While you are talking now of this, now that,
As though we differed scarcely save in trifles!
Festus.
Do we so differ? True, change must proceed,
Whether for good or ill; keep from me, which!
Do not confide all secrets: I was born
To hope, and you . . .
Paracelsus.
To trust: you know the fruits!
Festus.
Listen: I do believe, what you call trust
Was self-delusion at the best: for, see!
So long as God would kindly pioneer
A path for you, and screen you from the world,
Procure you full exemption from man's lot,
Man's common hopes and fears, on the mere pretext
Of your engagement in his serviceyield you
A limitless licence, make you God, in fact,
And turn your slaveyou were content to say
Most courtly praises! What is it, at last,
But selfishness without example? None
Could trace God's will so plain as you, while yours
Remained implied in it; but now you fail,
And we, who prate about that will, are fools!
In short, God's service is established here
As he determines fit, and not your way,
And this you cannot brook. Such discontent
Is weak. Renounce all creatureship at once!
Affirm an absolute right to have and use
Your energies; as though the rivers should say
"We rush to the ocean; what have we to do
"With feeding streamlets, lingering in the vales,
"Sleeping in lazy pools?" Set up that plea,
That will be bold at least!
Paracelsus.
'T is like enough.
The serviceable spirits are those, no doubt,
The East produces: lo, the master bids,
They wake, raise terraces and garden-grounds
In one night's space; and, this done, straight begin
Another century's sleep, to the great praise
Of him that framed them wise and beautiful,
Till a lamp's rubbing, or some chance akin,
Wake them again. I am of different mould.
I would have soothed my lord, and slaved for him
And done him service past my narrow bond,
And thus I get rewarded for my pains!
Beside, 't is vain to talk of forwarding
God's glory otherwise; this is alone
The sphere of its increase, as far as men
Increase it; why, then, look beyond this sphere?
We are his glory; and if we be glorious,
Is not the thing achieved?
Festus.
Shall one like me
Judge hearts like yours? Though years have changed you much,
And you have left your first love, and retain
Its empty shade to veil your crooked ways,
Yet I still hold that you have honoured God.
And who shall call your course without reward?
For, wherefore this repining at defeat
Had triumph ne'er inured you to high hopes?
I urge you to forsake the life you curse,
And what success attends me?simply talk
Of passion, weakness and remorse; in short,
Anything but the naked truthyou choose
This so-despised career, and cheaply hold
My happiness, or rather other men's.
Once more, return!
Paracelsus.
And quickly. John the thief
Has pilfered half my secrets by this time:
And we depart by daybreak. I am weary,
I know not how; not even the wine-cup soothes
My brain to-night . . .
Do you not thoroughly despise me, Festus?
No flattery! One like you needs not be told
We live and breathe deceiving and deceived.
Do you not scorn me from your heart of hearts,
Me and my cant, each petty subterfuge,
My rhymes and all this frothy shower of words,
My glozing self-deceit, my outward crust
Of lies which wrap, as tetter, morphew, furfair
Wrapt the sound flesh?so, see you flatter not!
Even God flatters: but my friend, at least,
Is true. I would depart, secure henceforth
Against all further insult, hate and wrong
From puny foes; my one friend's scorn shall brand me:
No fear of sinking deeper!
Festus.
No, dear Aureole!
No, no; I came to counsel faithfully.
There are old rules, made long ere we were born,
By which I judge you. I, so fallible,
So infinitely low beside your mighty
Majestic spirit!even I can see
You own some higher law than ours which call
Sin, what is no sinweakness, what is strength.
But I have only these, such as they are,
To guide me; and I blame you where they bid,
Only so long as blaming promises
To win peace for your soul: the more, that sorrow
Has fallen on me of late, and they have helped me
So that I faint not under my distress.
But wherefore should I scruple to avow
In spite of all, as brother judging brother,
Your fate is most inexplicable to me?
And should you perish without recompense
And satisfaction yettoo hastily
I have relied on love: you may have sinned,
But you have loved. As a mere human matter
As I would have God deal with fragile men
In the endI say that you will triumph yet!
Paracelsus.
Have you felt sorrow, Festus?'t is because
You love me. Sorrow, and sweet Michal yours!
Well thought on: never let her know this last
Dull winding-up of all: these miscreants dared
Insult meme she loved:so, grieve her not!
Festus.
Your ill success can little grieve her now.
Paracelsus.
Michal is dead! pray Christ we do not craze!
Festus.
Aureole, dear Aureole, look not on me thus!
Fool, fool! this is the heart grown sorrow-proof
I cannot bear those eyes.
Paracelsus.
Nay, really dead?
Festus.
'T is scarce a month.
Paracelsus.
Stone dead!then you have laid her
Among the flowers ere this. Now, do you know,
I can reveal a secret which shall comfort
Even you. I have no julep, as men think,
To cheat the grave; but a far better secret.
Know, then, you did not ill to trust your love
To the cold earth: I have thought much of it:
For I believe we do not wholly die.
Festus.
Aureole!
Paracelsus.
Nay, do not laugh; there is a reason
For what I say: I think the soul can never
Taste death. I am, just now, as you may see,
Very unfit to put so strange a thought
In an intelligible dress of words;
But take it as my trust, she is not dead.
Festus.
But not on this account alone? you surely,
Aureole, you have believed this all along?
Paracelsus.
And Michal sleeps among the roots and dews,
While I am moved at Basil, and full of schemes
For Nuremberg, and hoping and despairing,
As though it mattered how the farce plays out,
So it be quickly played. Away, away!
Have your will, rabble! while we fight the prize,
Troop you in safety to the snug back-seats
And leave a clear arena for the brave
About to perish for your sport!Behold!
~ Robert Browning, Paracelsus - Part IV - Paracelsus Aspires
,#NFDB
929:Scene. Basil; a chamber in the house of Paracelsus. 1526.
Paracelsus, Festus.
Paracelsus.
Heap logs and let the blaze laugh out!
Festus.
True, true!
'T is very fit all, time and chance and change
Have wrought since last we sat thus, face to face
And soul to soulall cares, far-looking fears,
Vague apprehensions, all vain fancies bred
By your long absence, should be cast away,
Forgotten in this glad unhoped renewal
Of our affections.
Paracelsus.
Oh, omit not aught
Which witnesses your own and Michal's own
Affection: spare not that! Only forget
The honours and the glories and what not,
It pleases you to tell profusely out.
Festus.
Nay, even your honours, in a sense, I waive:
The wondrous Paracelsus, life's dispenser,
Fate's commissary, idol of the schools
And courts, shall be no more than Aureole still,
Still Aureole and my friend as when we parted
Some twenty years ago, and I restrained
As best I could the promptings of my spirit
Which secretly advanced you, from the first,
To the pre-eminent rank which, since, your own
Adventurous ardour, nobly triumphing,
Has won for you.
Paracelsus.
Yes, yes. And Michal's face
Still wears that quiet and peculiar light
Like the dim circlet floating round a pearl?
Festus.
Just so.
Paracelsus.
And yet her calm sweet countenance,
Though saintly, was not sad; for she would sing
Alone. Does she still sing alone, bird-like,
Not dreaming you are near? Her carols dropt
In flakes through that old leafy bower built under
The sunny wall at Wrzburg, from her lattice
Among the trees above, while I, unseen,
Sat conning some rare scroll from Tritheim's shelves
Much wondering notes so simple could divert
My mind from study. Those were happy days.
Respect all such as sing when all alone!
Festus.
Scarcely alone: her children, you may guess,
Are wild beside her.
Paracelsus.
Ah, those children quite
Unsettle the pure picture in my mind:
A girl, she was so perfect, so distinct:
No change, no change! Not but this added grace
May blend and harmonize with its compeers,
And Michal may become her motherhood;
But't is a change, and I detest all change,
And most a change in aught I loved long since.
So, Michalyou have said she thinks of me?
Festus.
O very proud will Michal be of you!
Imagine how we sat, long winter-nights,
Scheming and wondering, shaping your presumed
Adventure, or devising its reward;
Shutting out fear with all the strength of hope.
For it was strange how, even when most secure
In our domestic peace, a certain dim
And flitting shade could sadden all; it seemed
A restlessness of heart, a silent yearning,
A sense of something wanting, incomplete
Not to be put in words, perhaps avoided
By mute consentbut, said or unsaid, felt
To point to one so loved and so long lost.
And then the hopes rose and shut out the fears
How you would laugh should I recount them now
I still predicted your return at last
With gifts beyond the greatest of them all,
All Tritheim's wondrous troop; did one of which
Attain renown by any chance, I smiled,
As well aware of who would prove his peer
Michal was sure some woman, long ere this,
As beautiful as you were sage, had loved . . .
Paracelsus.
Far-seeing, truly, to discern so much
In the fantastic projects and day-dreams
Of a raw restless boy!
Festus.
Oh, no: the sunrise
Well warranted our faith in this full noon!
Can I forget the anxious voice which said
"Festus, have thoughts like these ere shaped themselves
"In other brains than mine? have their possessors
"Existed in like circumstance? were they weak
"As I, or ever constant from the first,
"Despising youth's allurements and rejecting
"As spider-films the shackles I endure?
"Is there hope for me?"and I answered gravely
As an acknowledged elder, calmer, wiser,
More gifted mortal. O you must remember,
For all your glorious . . .
Paracelsus.
Glorious? ay, this hair,
These handsnay, touch them, they are mine! Recall
With all the said recallings, times when thus
To lay them by your own ne'er turned you pale
As now. Most glorious, are they not?
Festus.
Whywhy
Something must be subtracted from success
So wide, no doubt. He would be scrupulous, truly,
Who should object such drawbacks. Still, still, Aureole,
You are changed, very changed! 'T were losing nothing
To look well to it: you must not be stolen
From the enjoyment of your well-won meed.
Paracelsus.
My friend! you seek my pleasure, past a doubt:
You will best gain your point, by talking, not
Of me, but of yourself.
Festus.
Have I not said
All touching Michal and my children? Sure
You know, by this, full well how Aennchen looks
Gravely, while one disparts her thick brown hair;
And Aureole's glee when some stray gannet builds
Amid the birch-trees by the lake. Small hope
Have I that he will honour (the wild imp)
His namesake. Sigh not! 't is too much to ask
That all we love should reach the same proud fate.
But you are very kind to humour me
By showing interest in my quiet life;
You, who of old could never tame yourself
To tranquil pleasures, must at heart despise . . .
Paracelsus.
Festus, strange secrets are let out by death
Who blabs so oft the follies of this world:
And I am death's familiar, as you know.
I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go-cart to one end
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favourites. No mean trick
He left untried, and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him:
Then died, grown old. And just an hour before,
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes,
He sat up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him.
Just so, allowing I am passing sage,
It seems to me much worthier argument
Why pansies,[1] eyes that laugh, bear beauty's prize
From violets, eyes that dream(your Michal's choice)
Than all fools find to wonder at in me
Or in my fortunes. And be very sure
I say this from no prurient restlessness,
No self-complacency, itching to turn,
Vary and view its pleasure from all points,
And, in this instance, willing other men
May be at pains, demonstrate to itself
The realness of the very joy it tastes.
What should delight me like the news of friends
Whose memories were a solace to me oft,
As mountain-baths to wild fowls in their flight?
Ofter than you had wasted thought on me
Had you been wise, and rightly valued bliss.
But there's no taming nor repressing hearts:
God knows I need such!So, you heard me speak?
Festus.
Speak? when?
Paracelsus.
When but this morning at my class?
There was noise and crowd enough. I saw you not.
Surely you know I am engaged to fill
The chair here?that't is part of my proud fate
To lecture to as many thick-skulled youths
As please, each day, to throng the theatre,
To my great reputation, and no small
Danger of Basil's benches long unused
To crack beneath such honour?
Festus.
I was there;
I mingled with the throng: shall I avow
Small care was mine to listen?too intent
On gathering from the murmurs of the crowd
A full corroboration of my hopes!
What can I learn about your powers? but they
Know, care for nought beyond your actual state,
Your actual value; yet they worship you,
Those various natures whom you sway as one!
But ere I go, be sure I shall attend . . .
Paracelsus.
Stop, o' God's name: the thing's by no means yet
Past remedy! Shall I read this morning's labour
At least in substance? Nought so worth the gaining
As an apt scholar! Thus then, with all due
Precision and emphasisyou, beside, are clearly
Guiltless of understanding more, a whit,
The subject than your stoolallowed to be
A notable advantage.
Festus.
Surely, Aureole,
You laugh at me!
Paracelsus.
I laugh? Ha, ha! thank heaven,
I charge you, if't be so! for I forget
Much, and what laughter should be like. No less,
However, I forego that luxury
Since it alarms the friend who brings it back.
True, laughter like my own must echo strangely
To thinking men; a smile were better far;
So, make me smile! If the exulting look
You wore but now be smiling, 't is so long
Since I have smiled! Alas, such smiles are born
Alone of hearts like yours, or herdsmen's souls
Of ancient time, whose eyes, calm as their flocks,
Saw in the stars mere garnishry of heaven,
And in the earth a stage for altars only.
Never change, Festus: I say, never change!
Festus.
My God, if he be wretched after all
Paracelsus.
When last we parted, Festus, you declared,
Or Michal, yes, her soft lips whispered words
I have preserved. She told me she believed
I should succeed (meaning, that in the search
I then engaged in, I should meet success)
And yet be wretched: now, she augured false.
Festus.
Thank heaven! but you spoke strangely: could I venture
To think bare apprehension lest your friend,
Dazzled by your resplendent course, might find
Henceforth less sweetness in his own, could move
Such earnest mood in you? Fear not, dear friend,
That I shall leave you, inwardly repining
Your lot was not my own!
Paracelsus.
And this for ever!
For ever! gull who may, they will be gulled!
They will not look nor think;'t is nothing new
In them: but surely he is not of them!
My Festus, do you know, I reckoned, you
Though all beside were sand-blindyou, my friend,
Would look at me, once close, with piercing eye
Untroubled by the false glare that confounds
A weaker vision: would remain serene,
Though singular amid a gaping throng.
I feared you, or I had come, sure, long ere this,
To Einsiedeln. Well, error has no end,
And Rhasis is a sage, and Basil boasts
A tribe of wits, and I am wise and blest
Past all dispute! 'T is vain to fret at it.
I have vowed long ago my worshippers
Shall owe to their own deep sagacity
All further information, good or bad.
Small risk indeed my reputation runs,
Unless perchance the glance now searching me
Be fixed much longer; for it seems to spell
Dimly the characters a simpler man
Might read distinct enough. Old Eastern books
Say, the fallen prince of morning some short space
Remained unchanged in semblance; nay, his brow
Was hued with triumph: every spirit then
Praising, his heart on flame the while:a tale!
Well, Festus, what discover you, I pray?
Festus.
Some foul deed sullies then a life which else
Were raised supreme?
Paracelsus.
Good: I do well, most well
Why strive to make men hear, feel, fret themselves
With what is past their power to comprehend?
I should not strive now: only, having nursed
The faint surmise that one yet walked the earth,
One, at least, not the utter fool of show,
Not absolutely formed to be the dupe
Of shallow plausibilities alone:
One who, in youth, found wise enough to choose
The happiness his riper years approve,
Was yet so anxious for another's sake,
That, ere his friend could rush upon a mad
And ruinous course, the converse of his own,
His gentle spirit essayed, prejudged for him
The perilous path, foresaw its destiny,
And warned the weak one in such tender words,
Such accentshis whole heart in every tone
That oft their memory comforted that friend
When it by right should have increased despair:
Having believed, I say, that this one man
Could never lose the light thus from the first
His portionhow should I refuse to grieve
At even my gain if it disturb our old
Relation, if it make me out more wise?
Therefore, once more reminding him how well
He prophesied, I note the single flaw
That spoils his prophet's title. In plain words,
You were deceived, and thus were you deceived
I have not been successful, and yet am
Most miserable; 't is said at last; nor you
Give credit, lest you force me to concede
That common sense yet lives upon the world!
Festus.
You surely do not mean to banter me?
Paracelsus.
You know, orif you have been wise enough
To cleanse your memory of such mattersknew,
As far as words of mine could make it clear,
That't was my purpose to find joy or grief
Solely in the fulfilment of my plan
Or plot or whatsoe'er it was; rejoicing
Alone as it proceeded prosperously,
Sorrowing then only when mischance retarded
Its progress. That was in those Wrzburg days!
Not to prolong a theme I thoroughly hate,
I have pursued this plan with all my strength;
And having failed therein most signally,
Cannot object to ruin utter and drear
As all-excelling would have been the prize
Had fortune favoured me. I scarce have right
To vex your frank good spirit late so glad
In my supposed prosperity, I know,
And, were I lucky in a glut of friends,
Would well agree to let your error live,
Nay, strengthen it with fables of success.
But mine is no condition to refuse
The transient solace of so rare a godsend,
My solitary luxury, my one friend:
Accordingly I venture to put off
The wearisome vest of falsehood galling me,
Secure when he is by. I lay me bare
Prone at his mercybut he is my friend!
Not that he needs retain his aspect grave;
That answers not my purpose; for't is like,
Some sunny morningBasil being drained
Of its wise population, every corner
Of the amphitheatre crammed with learned clerks,
Here OEcolampadius, looking worlds of wit,
Here Castellanus, as profound as he,
Munsterus here, Frobenius there, all squeezed
And staring,that the zany of the show,
Even Paracelsus, shall put off before them
His trappings with a grace but seldom judged
Expedient in such cases:the grim smile
That will go round! Is it not therefore best
To venture a rehearsal like the present
In a small way? Where are the signs I seek,
The first-fruits and fair sample of the scorn
Due to all quacks? Why, this will never do!
Festus.
These are foul vapours, Aureole; nought beside!
The effect of watching, study, weariness.
Were there a spark of truth in the confusion
Of these wild words, you would not outrage thus
Your youth's companion. I shall ne'er regard
These wanderings, bred of faintness and much study.
'T is not thus you would trust a trouble to me,
To Michal's friend.
Paracelsus.
I have said it, dearest Festus!
For the manner, 't is ungracious probably;
You may have it told in broken sobs, one day,
And scalding tears, ere long: but I thought best
To keep that off as long as possible.
Do you wonder still?
Festus.
No; it must oft fall out
That one whose labour perfects any work,
Shall rise from it with eye so worn that he
Of all men least can measure the extent
Of what he has accomplished. He alone
Who, nothing tasked, is nothing weary too,
May clearly scan the little he effects:
But we, the bystanders, untouched by toil,
Estimate each aright.
Paracelsus.
This worthy Festus
Is one of them, at last! 'T is so with all!
First, they set down all progress as a dream;
And next, when he whose quick discomfiture
Was counted on, accomplishes some few
And doubtful steps in his career,behold,
They look for every inch of ground to vanish
Beneath his tread, so sure they spy success!
Festus.
Few doubtful steps? when death retires before
Your presencewhen the noblest of mankind,
Broken in body or subdued in soul,
May through your skill renew their vigour, raise
The shattered frame to pristine stateliness?
When men in racking pain may purchase dreams
Of what delights them most, swooning at once
Into a sea of bliss or rapt along
As in a flying sphere of turbulent light?
When we may look to you as one ordained
To free the flesh from fell disease, as frees
Our Luther's burning tongue the fettered soul?
When . . .
Paracelsus.
When and where, the devil, did you get
This notable news?
Festus.
Even from the common voice;
From those whose envy, daring not dispute
The wonders it decries, attributes them
To magic and such folly.
Paracelsus.
Folly? Why not
To magic, pray? You find a comfort doubtless
In holding, God ne'er troubles him about
Us or our doings: once we were judged worth
The devil's tempting . . . I offend: forgive me,
And rest content. Your prophecy on the whole
Was fair enough as prophesyings go;
At fault a little in detail, but quite
Precise enough in the main; and hereupon
I pay due homage: you guessed long ago
(The prophet!) I should failand I have failed.
Festus.
You mean to tell me, then, the hopes which fed
Your youth have not been realized as yet?
Some obstacle has barred them hitherto?
Or that their innate . . .
Paracelsus.
As I said but now,
You have a very decent prophet's fame,
So you but shun details here. Little matter
Whether those hopes were mad,the aims they sought,
Safe and secure from all ambitious fools;
Or whether my weak wits are overcome
By what a better spirit would scorn: I fail.
And now methinks't were best to change a theme
I am a sad fool to have stumbled on.
I say confusedly what comes uppermost;
But there are times when patience proves at fault,
As now: this morning's strange encounteryou
Beside me once again! you, whom I guessed
Alive, since hitherto (with Luther's leave)
No friend have I among the saints at peace,
To judge by any good their prayers effect.
I knew you would have helped mewhy not he,
My strange competitor in enterprise,
Bound for the same end by another path,
Arrived, or ill or well, before the time,
At our disastrous journey's doubtful close?
How goes it with Aprile? Ah, they miss
Your lone sad sunny idleness of heaven,
Our martyrs for the world's sake; heaven shuts fast:
The poor mad poet is howling by this time!
Since you are my sole friend then, here or there,
I could not quite repress the varied feelings
This meeting wakens; they have had their vent,
And now forget them. Do the rear-mice still
Hang like a fretwork on the gate (or what
In my time was a gate) fronting the road
From Einsiedeln to Lachen?
Festus.
Trifle not:
Answer me, for my sake alone! You smiled
Just now, when I supposed some deed, unworthy
Yourself, might blot the else so bright result;
Yet if your motives have continued pure,
Your will unfaltering, and in spite of this,
You have experienced a defeat, why then
I say not you would cheerfully withdraw
From contestmortal hearts are not so fashioned
But surely you would ne'ertheless withdraw.
You sought not fame nor gain nor even love,
No end distinct from knowledge,I repeat
Your very words: once satisfied that knowledge
Is a mere dream, you would announce as much,
Yourself the first. But how is the event?
You are defeatedand I find you here!
Paracelsus.
As though "here" did not signify defeat!
I spoke not of my little labours here,
But of the break-down of my general aims:
For you, aware of their extent and scope,
To look on these sage lecturings, approved
By beardless boys, and bearded dotards worse,
As a fit consummation of such aims,
Is worthy notice. A professorship
At Basil! Since you see so much in it,
And think my life was reasonably drained
Of life's delights to render me a match
For duties arduous as such post demands,
Be it far from me to deny my power
To fill the petty circle lotted out
Of infinite space, or justify the host
Of honours thence accruing. So, take notice,
This jewel dangling from my neck preserves
The features of a prince, my skill restored
To plague his people some few years to come:
And all through a pure whim. He had eased the earth
For me, but that the droll despair which seized
The vermin of his household, tickled me.
I came to see. Here, drivelled the physician,
Whose most infallible nostrum was at fault;
There quaked the astrologer, whose horoscope
Had promised him interminable years;
Here a monk fumbled at the sick man's mouth
With some undoubted relica sudary
Of the Virgin; while another piebald knave
Of the same brotherhood (he loved them ever)
Was actively preparing 'neath his nose
Such a suffumigation as, once fired,
Had stunk the patient dead ere he could groan.
I cursed the doctor and upset the brother,
Brushed past the conjurer, vowed that the first gust
Of stench from the ingredients just alight
Would raise a cross-grained devil in my sword,
Not easily laid: and ere an hour the prince
Slept as he never slept since prince he was.
A dayand I was posting for my life,
Placarded through the town as one whose spite
Had near availed to stop the blessed effects
Of the doctor's nostrum which, well seconded
By the sudary, and most by the costly smoke
Not leaving out the strenuous prayers sent up
Hard by in the abbeyraised the prince to life:
To the great reputation of the seer
Who, confident, expected all along
The glad eventthe doctor's recompense
Much largess from his highness to the monks
And the vast solace of his loving people,
Whose general satisfaction to increase,
The prince was pleased no longer to defer
The burning of some dozen heretics
Remanded till God's mercy should be shown
Touching his sickness: last of all were joined
Ample directions to all loyal folk
To swell the complement by seizing me
Whodoubtless some rank sorcererendeavoured
To thwart these pious offices, obstruct
The prince's cure, and frustrate heaven by help
Of certain devils dwelling in his sword.
By luck, the prince in his first fit of thanks
Had forced this bauble on me as an earnest
Of further favours. This one case may serve
To give sufficient taste of many such,
So, let them pass. Those shelves support a pile
Of patents, licences, diplomas, titles
From Germany, France, Spain, and Italy;
They authorize some honour; ne'ertheless,
I set more store by this Erasmus sent;
He trusts me; our Frobenius is his friend,
And him "I raised" (nay, read it) "from the dead."
I weary you, I see. I merely sought
To show, there's no great wonder after all
That, while I fill the class-room and attract
A crowd to Basil, I get leave to stay,
And therefore need not scruple to accept
The utmost they can offer, if I please:
For't is but right the world should be prepared
To treat with favour e'en fantastic wants
Of one like me, used up in serving her.
Just as the mortal, whom the gods in part
Devoured, received in place of his lost limb
Some virtue or othercured disease, I think;
You mind the fables we have read together.
Festus.
You do not think I comprehend a word.
The time was, Aureole, you were apt enough
To clothe the airiest thoughts in specious breath;
But surely you must feel how vague and strange
These speeches sound.
Paracelsus.
Well, then: you know my hopes;
I am assured, at length, those hopes were vain;
That truth is just as far from me as ever;
That I have thrown my life away; that sorrow
On that account is idle, and further effort
To mend and patch what's marred beyond repairing,
As useless: and all this was taught your friend
By the convincing good old-fashioned method
Of forceby sheer compulsion. Is that plain?
Festus.
Dear Aureole, can it be my fears were just?
God wills not . . .
Paracelsus.
Now, 't is this I most admire
The constant talk men of your stamp keep up
Of God's will, as they style it; one would swear
Man had but merely to uplift his eye,
And see the will in question charactered
On the heaven's vault. 'T is hardly wise to moot
Such topics: doubts are many and faith is weak.
I know as much of any will of God
As knows some dumb and tortured brute what Man,
His stern lord, wills from the perplexing blows
That plague him every way; but there, of course,
Where least he suffers, longest he remains
My case; and for such reasons I plod on,
Subdued but not convinced. I know as little
Why I deserve to fail, as why I hoped
Better things in my youth. I simply know
I am no master here, but trained and beaten
Into the path I tread; and here I stay,
Until some further intimation reach me,
Like an obedient drudge. Though I prefer
To view the whole thing as a task imposed
Which, whether dull or pleasant, must be done
Yet, I deny not, there is made provision
Of joys which tastes less jaded might affect;
Nay, some which please me too, for all my pride
Pleasures that once were pains: the iron ring
Festering about a slave's neck grows at length
Into the flesh it eats. I hate no longer
A host of petty vile delights, undreamed of
Or spurned before; such now supply the place
Of my dead aims: as in the autumn woods
Where tall trees used to flourish, from their roots
Springs up a fungous brood sickly and pale,
Chill mushrooms coloured like a corpse's cheek.
Festus.
If I interpret well your words, I own
It troubles me but little that your aims,
Vast in their dawning and most likely grown
Extravagantly since, have baffled you.
Perchance I am glad; you merit greater praise;
Because they are too glorious to be gained,
You do not blindly cling to them and die;
You fell, but have not sullenly refused
To rise, because an angel worsted you
In wrestling, though the world holds not your peer;
And though too harsh and sudden is the change
To yield content as yet, still you pursue
The ungracious path as though't were rosv-strewn.
'T is well: and your reward, or soon or late,
Will come from him whom no man serves in vain.
Paracelsus.
Ah, very fine! For my part, I conceive
The very pausing from all further toil,
Which you find heinous, would become a seal
To the sincerity of all my deeds.
To be consistent I should die at once;
I calculated on no after-life;
Yet (how crept in, how fostered, I know not)
Here am I with as passionate regret
For youth and health and love so vainly lavished,
As if their preservation had been first
And foremost in my thoughts; and this strange fact
Humbled me wondrously, and had due force
In rendering me the less averse to follow
A certain counsel, a mysterious warning
You will not understandbut't was a man
With aims not mine and yet pursued like mine,
With the same fervour and no more success,
Perishing in my sight; who summoned me
As I would shun the ghastly fate I saw,
To serve my race at once; to wait no longer
That God should interfere in my behalf,
But to distrust myself, put pride away,
And give my gains, imperfect as they were,
To men. I have not leisure to explain
How, since, a singular series of events
Has raised me to the station you behold,
Wherein I seem to turn to most account
The mere wreck of the past,perhaps receive
Some feeble glimmering token that God views
And may approve my penance: therefore here
You find me, doing most good or least harm.
And if folks wonder much and profit little
'T is not my fault; only, I shall rejoice
When my part in the farce is shuffled through,
And the curtain falls: I must hold out till then.
Festus.
Till when, dear Aureole?
Paracelsus.
Till I'm fairly thrust
From my proud eminence. Fortune is fickle
And even professors fall: should that arrive,
I see no sin in ceding to my bent.
You little fancy what rude shocks apprise us
We sin; God's intimations rather fail
In clearness than in energy: 't were well
Did they but indicate the course to take
Like that to be forsaken. I would fain
Be spared a further sample. Here I stand,
And here I stay, be sure, till forced to flit.
Festus.
Be you but firm on that head! long ere then
All I expect will come to pass, I trust:
The cloud that wraps you will have disappeared.
Meantime, I see small chance of such event:
They praise you here as one whose lore, already
Divulged, eclipses all the past can show,
But whose achievements, marvellous as they be,
Are faint anticipations of a glory
About to be revealed. When Basil's crowds
Dismiss their teacher, I shall be content
That he depart.
Paracelsus.
This favour at their hands
I look for earlier than your view of things
Would warrant. Of the crowd you saw to-day,
Remove the full half sheer amazement draws,
Mere novelty, nought else; and next, the tribe
Whose innate blockish dulness just perceives
That unless miracles (as seem my works)
Be wrought in their behalf, their chance is slight
To puzzle the devil; next, the numerous set
Who bitterly hate established schools, and help
The teacher that oppugns them, till he once
Have planted his own doctrine, when the teacher
May reckon on their rancour in his turn;
Take, too, the sprinkling of sagacious knaves
Whose cunning runs not counter to the vogue
But seeks, by flattery and crafty nursing,
To force my system to a premature
Short-lived development. Why swell the list?
Each has his end to serve, and his best way
Of serving it: remove all these, remains
A scantling, a poor dozen at the best,
Worthy to look for sympathy and service,
And likely to draw profit from my pains.
Festus.
'T is no encouraging picture: still these few
Redeem their fellows. Once the germ implanted,
Its growth, if slow, is sure.
Paracelsus.
God grant it so!
I would make some amends: but if I fail,
The luckless rogues have this excuse to urge,
That much is in my method and my manner,
My uncouth habits, my impatient spirit,
Which hinders of reception and result
My doctrine: much to say, small skill to speak!
These old aims suffered not a looking-off
Though for an instant; therefore, only when
I thus renounced them and resolved to reap
Some present fruitto teach mankind some truth
So dearly purchasedonly then I found
Such teaching was an art requiring cares
And qualities peculiar to itself:
That to possess was one thingto display
Another. With renown first in my thoughts,
Or popular praise, I had soon discovered it:
One grows but little apt to learn these things.
Festus.
If it be so, which nowise I believe,
There needs no waiting fuller dispensation
To leave a labour of so little use.
Why not throw up the irksome charge at once?
Paracelsus.
A task, a task!
But wherefore hide the whole
Extent of degradation, once engaged
In the confessing vein? Despite of all
My fine talk of obedience and repugnance,
Docility and what not, 't is yet to learn
If when the task shall really be performed,
My inclination free to choose once more,
I shall do aught but slightly modify
The nature of the hated task I quit.
In plain words, I am spoiled; my life still tends
As first it tended; I am broken and trained
To my old habits: they are part of me.
I know, and none so well, my darling ends
Are proved impossible: no less, no less,
Even now what humours me, fond fool, as when
Their faint ghosts sit with me and flatter me
And send me back content to my dull round?
How can I change this soul?this apparatus
Constructed solely for their purposes,
So well adapted to their every want,
To search out and discover, prove and perfect;
This intricate machine whose most minute
And meanest motions have their charm to me
Though to none elsean aptitude I seize,
An object I perceive, a use, a meaning,
A property, a fitness, I explain
And I alone:how can I change my soul?
And this wronged body, worthless save when tasked
Under that soul's dominionused to care
For its bright master's cares and quite subdue
Its proper cravingsnot to ail nor pine
So he but prosperwhither drag this poor
Tried patient body? God! how I essayed
To live like that mad poet, for a while,
To love alone; and how I felt too warped
And twisted and deformed! What should I do,
Even tho'released from drudgery, but return
Faint, as you see, and halting, blind and sore,
To my old life and die as I began?
I cannot feed on beauty for the sake
Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm
From lovely objects for their loveliness;
My nature cannot lose her first imprint;
I still must hoard and heap and class all truths
With one ulterior purpose: I must know!
Would God translate me to his throne, believe
That I should only listen to his word
To further my own aim! For other men,
Beauty is prodigally strewn around,
And I were happy could I quench as they
This mad and thriveless longing, and content me
With beauty for itself alone: alas,
I have addressed a frock of heavy mail
Yet may not join the troop of sacred knights;
And now the forest-creatures fly from me,
The grass-banks cool, the sunbeams warm no more.
Best follow, dreaming that ere night arrive,
I shall o'ertake the company and ride
Glittering as they!
Festus.
I think I apprehend
What you would say: if you, in truth, design
To enter once more on the life thus left,
Seek not to hide that all this consciousness
Of failure is assumed!
Paracelsus.
My friend, my friend,
I toil, you listen; I explain, perhaps
You understand: there our communion ends.
Have you learnt nothing from to-day's discourse?
When we would thoroughly know the sick man's state
We feel awhile the fluttering pulse, press soft
The hot brow, look upon the languid eye,
And thence divine the rest. Must I lay bare
My heart, hideous and beating, or tear up
My vitals for your gaze, ere you will deem
Enough made known? You! who are you, forsooth?
That is the crowning operation claimed
By the arch-demonstratorheaven the hall,
And earth the audience. Let Aprile and you
Secure good places: 't will be worth the while.
Festus.
Are you mad, Aureole? What can I have said
To call for this? I judged from your own words.
Paracelsus.
Oh, doubtless! A sick wretch describes the ape
That mocks him from the bed-foot, and all gravely
You thither turn at once: or he recounts
The perilous journey he has late performed,
And you are puzzled much how that could be!
You find me here, half stupid and half mad;
It makes no part of my delight to search
Into these matters, much less undergo
Another's scrutiny; but so it chances
That I am led to trust my state to you:
And the event is, you combine, contrast
And ponder on my foolish words as though
They thoroughly conveyed all hidden here
Here, loathsome with despair and hate and rage!
Is there no fear, no shrinking and no shame?
Will you guess nothing? will you spare me nothing?
Must I go deeper? Ay or no?
Festus.
Dear friend . . .
Paracelsus.
True: I am brutal't is a part of it;
The plague's signyou are not a lazar-haunter,
How should you know? Well then, you think it strange
I should profess to have failed utterly,
And yet propose an ultimate return
To courses void of hope: and this, because
You know not what temptation is, nor how
'T is like to ply men in the sickliest part.
You are to understand that we who make
Sport for the gods, are hunted to the end:
There is not one sharp volley shot at us,
Which 'scaped with life, though hurt, we slacken pace
And gather by the wayside herbs and roots
To staunch our wounds, secure from further harm:
We are assailed to life's extremest verge.
It will be well indeed if I return,
A harmless busy fool, to my old ways!
I would forget hints of another fate,
Significant enough, which silent hours
Have lately scared me with.
Festus.
Another! and what?
Paracelsus.
After all, Festus, you say well: I am
A man yet: I need never humble me.
I would have beensomething, I know not what;
But though I cannot soar, I do not crawl.
There are worse portions than this one of mine.
You say well!
Festus.
Ah!
Paracelsus.
And deeper degradation!
If the mean stimulants of vulgar praise,
If vanity should become the chosen food
Of a sunk mind, should stifle even the wish
To find its early aspirations true,
Should teach it to breathe falsehood like life-breath
An atmosphere of craft and trick and lies;
Should make it proud to emulate, surpass
Base natures in the practices which woke
Its most indignant loathing once . . . No, no!
Utter damnation is reserved for hell!
I had immortal feelings; such shall never
Be wholly quenched: no, no!
My friend, you wear
A melancholy face, and certain't is
There's little cheer in all this dismal work.
But was it my desire to set abroach
Such memories and forebodings? I foresaw
Where they would drive. 'T were better we discuss
News from Lucerne or Zurich; ask and tell
Of Egypt's flaring sky or Spain's cork-groves.
Festus.
I have thought: trust me, this mood will pass away!
I know you and the lofty spirit you bear,
And easily ravel out a clue to all.
These are the trials meet for such as you,
Nor must you hope exemption: to be mortal
Is to be plied with trials manifold.
Look round! The obstacles which kept the rest
From your ambition, have been spurned by you;
Their fears, their doubts, the chains that bind themall,
Were flax before your resolute soul, which nought
Avails to awe save these delusions bred
From its own strength, its selfsame strength disguised,
Mocking itself. Be brave, dear Aureole! Since
The rabbit has his shade to frighten him,
The fawn a rustling bough, mortals their cares,
And higher natures yet would slight and laugh
At these entangling fantasies, as you
At trammels of a weaker intellect,
Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts!
I know you.
Paracelsus.
And I know you, dearest Festus!
And how you love unworthily; and how
All admiration renders blind.
Festus.
You hold
That admiration blinds?
Paracelsus.
Ay and alas!
Festus.
Nought blinds you less than admiration, friend!
Whether it be that all love renders wise
In its degree; from love which blends with love
Heart answering heartto love which spends itself
In silent mad idolatry of some
Pre-eminent mortal, some great soul of souls,
Which ne'er will know how well it is adored.
I say, such love is never blind; but rather
Alive to every the minutest spot
Which mars its object, and which hate (supposed
So vigilant and searching) dreams not of.
Love broods on such: what then? When first perceived
Is there no sweet strife to forget, to change,
To overflush those blemishes with all
The glow of general goodness they disturb?
To make those very defects an endless source
Of new affection grown from hopes and fears?
And, when all fails, is there no gallant stand
Made even for much proved weak? no shrinking-back
Lest, since all love assimilates the soul
To what it loves, it should at length become
Almost a rival of its idol? Trust me,
If there be fiends who seek to work our hurt,
To ruin and drag down earth's mightiest spirits
Even at God's foot, 't will be from such as love,
Their zeal will gather most to serve their cause;
And least from those who hate, who most essay
By contumely and scorn to blot the light
Which forces entrance even to their hearts:
For thence will our defender tear the veil
And show within each heart, as in a shrine,
The giant image of perfection, grown
In hate's despite, whose calumnies were spawned
In the untroubled presence of its eyes.
True admiration blinds not; nor am I
So blind. I call your sin exceptional;
It springs from one whose life has passed the bounds
Prescribed to life. Compound that fault with God!
I speak of men; to common men like me
The weakness you reveal endears you more,
Like the far traces of decay in suns.
I bid you have good cheer!
Paracelsus.
Proeclare! Optime!
Think of a quiet mountain-cloistered priest
Instructing Paracelsus! yet't is so.
Come, I will show you where my merit lies.
'T is in the advance of individual minds
That the slow crowd should ground their expectation
Eventually to follow; as the sea
Waits ages in its bed till some one wave
Out of the multitudinous mass, extends
The empire of the whole, some feet perhaps,
Over the strip of sand which could confine
Its fellows so long time: thenceforth the rest,
Even to the meanest, hurry in at once,
And so much is clear gained. I shall be glad
If all my labours, failing of aught else,
Suffice to make such inroad and procure
A wider range for thought: nay, they do this;
For, whatsoe'er my notions of true knowledge
And a legitimate success, may be,
I am not blind to my undoubted rank
When classed with others: I precede my age:
And whoso wills is very free to mount
These labours as a platform whence his own
May have a prosperous outset. But, alas!
My followersthey are noisy as you heard;
But, for intelligence, the best of them
So clumsily wield the weapons I supply
And they extol, that I begin to doubt
Whether their own rude clubs and pebble-stones
Would not do better service than my arms
Thus vilely swayedif error will not fall
Sooner before the old awkward batterings
Than my more subtle warfare, not half learned.
Festus.
I would supply that art, then, or withhold
New arms until you teach their mystery.
Paracelsus.
Content you, 't is my wish; I have recourse
To the simplest training. Day by day I seek
To wake the mood, the spirit which alone
Can make those arms of any use to men.
Of course they are for swaggering forth at once
Graced with Ulysses' bow, Achilles' shield
Flash on us, all in armour, thou Achilles!
Make our hearts dance to thy resounding step!
A proper sight to scare the crows away!
Festus.
Pity you choose not then some other method
Of coming at your point. The marvellous art
At length established in the world bids fair
To remedy all hindrances like these:
Trust to Frobenius' press the precious lore
Obscured by uncouth manner, or unfit
For raw beginners; let his types secure
A deathless monument to after-time;
Meanwhile wait confidently and enjoy
The ultimate effect: sooner or later
You shall be all-revealed.
Paracelsus.
The old dull question
In a new form; no more. Thus: I possess
Two sorts of knowledge; one,vast, shadowy,
Hints of the unbounded aim I once pursued:
The other consists of many secrets, caught
While bent on nobler prize,perhaps a few
Prime principles which may conduct to much:
These last I offer to my followers here.
Now, bid me chronicle the first of these,
My ancient study, and in effect you bid
Revert to the wild courses just abjured:
I must go find them scattered through the world.
Then, for the principles, they are so simple
(Being chiefly of the overturning sort),
That one time is as proper to propound them
As any otherto-morrow at my class,
Or half a century hence embalmed in print.
For if mankind intend to learn at all,
They must begin by giving faith to them
And acting on them: and I do not see
But that my lectures serve indifferent well:
No doubt these dogmas fall not to the earth,
For all their novelty and rugged setting.
I think my class will not forget the day
I let them know the gods of Israel,
Atius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis,
Serapion, Avicenna, Averres,
Were blocks!
Festus.
And that reminds me, I heard something
About your waywardness: you burned their books,
It seems, instead of answering those sages.
Paracelsus.
And who said that?
Festus.
Some I met yesternight
With OEcolampadius. As you know, the purpose
Of this short stay at Basil was to learn
His pleasure touching certain missives sent
For our Zuinglius and himself. 'T was he
Apprised me that the famous teacher here
Was my old friend.
Paracelsus.
Ah, I forgot: you went . . .
Festus.
From Zurich with advices for the ear
Of Luther, now at Wittenberg(you know,
I make no doubt, the differences of late
With Carolostadius)and returning sought
Basil and . . .
Paracelsus.
I remember. Here's a case, now,
Will teach you why I answer not, but burn
The books you mention. Pray, does Luther dream
His arguments convince by their own force
The crowds that own his doctrine? No, indeed!
His plain denial of established points
Ages had sanctified and men supposed
Could never be oppugned while earth was under
And heaven above thempoints which chance or time
Affected notdid more than the array
Of argument which followed. Boldly deny!
There is much breath-stopping, hair-stiffening
Awhile; then, amazed glances, mute awaiting
The thunderbolt which does not come: and next,
Reproachful wonder and inquiry: those
Who else had never stirred, are able now
To find the rest out for themselves, perhaps
To outstrip him who set the whole at work,
As never will my wise class its instructor.
And you saw Luther?
Festus.
'T is a wondrous soul!
Paracelsus.
True: the so-heavy chain which galled mankind
Is shattered, and the noblest of us all
Must bow to the deliverernay, the worker
Of our own projectwe who long before
Had burst our trammels, but forgot the crowd,
We should have taught, still groaned beneath the load:
This he has done and nobly. Speed that may!
Whatever be my chance or my mischance,
What benefits mankind must glad me too;
And men seem made, though not as I believed,
For something better than the times produce.
Witness these gangs of peasants your new lights
From Suabia have possessed, whom Mnzer leads,
And whom the duke, the landgrave and the elector
Will calm in blood! Well, well; 't is not my world!
Festus.
Hark!
Paracelsus.
'T is the melancholy wind astir
Within the trees; the embers too are grey:
Morn must be near.
Festus.
Best ope the casement: see,
The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars,
Is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep
The tree-tops altogether! Like an asp,
The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.
Paracelsus.
Ay; you would gaze on a wind-shaken tree
By the hour, nor count time lost.
Festus.
So you shall gaze:
Those happy times will come again.
Paracelsus.
Gone, gone,
Those pleasant times! Does not the moaning wind
Seem to bewail that we have gained such gains
And bartered sleep for them?
Festus.
It is our trust
That there is yet another world to mend
All error and mischance.
Paracelsus.
Another world!
And why this world, this common world, to be
A make-shift, a mere foil, how fair soever,
To some fine life to come? Man must be fed
With angels' food, forsooth; and some few traces
Of a diviner nature which look out
Through his corporeal baseness, warrant him
In a supreme contempt of all provision
For his inferior tastessome straggling marks
Which constitute his essence, just as truly
As here and there a gem would constitute
The rock, their barren bed, one diamond.
But were it sowere man all mindhe gains
A station little enviable. From God
Down to the lowest spirit ministrant,
Intelligence exists which casts our mind
Into immeasurable shade. No, no:
Love, hope, fear, faiththese make humanity;
These are its sign and note and character,
And these I have lost!gone, shut from me for ever,
Like a dead friend safe from unkindness more!
See, morn at length. The heavy darkness seems
Diluted, grey and clear without the stars;
The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if
Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go
His hold; and from the East, fuller and fuller
Day, like a mighty river, flowing in;
But clouded, wintry, desolate and cold.
Yet see how that broad prickly star-shaped plant,
Half-down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves
All thick and glistering with diamond dew.
And you depart for Einsiedeln this day,
And we have spent all night in talk like this!
If you would have me better for your love,
Revert no more to these sad themes.
Festus.
One favour,
And I have done. I leave you, deeply moved;
Unwilling to have fared so well, the while
My friend has changed so sorely. If this mood
Shall pass away, if light once more arise
Where all is darkness now, if you see fit
To hope and trust again, and strive again,
You will remembernot our love alone
But that my faith in God's desire that man
Should trust on his support, (as I must think
You trusted) is obscured and dim through you:
For you are thus, and this is no reward.
Will you not call me to your side, dear Aureole?
~ Robert Browning, Paracelsus - Part III - Paracelsus
,#NFDB
37 Integral Yoga
27 Yoga
25 Poetry
16 Psychology
15 Occultism
5 Christianity
4 Science
3 Fiction
2 Mythology
2 Hinduism
2 Education
1 Philsophy
1 Islam
23 Sri Ramakrishna
15 The Mother
14 Carl Jung
10 Sri Aurobindo
10 A B Purani
9 Walt Whitman
9 Satprem
8 Aleister Crowley
5 Swami Vivekananda
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Hakim Sanai
4 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
4 Jordan Peterson
3 Robert Browning
3 Nolini Kanta Gupta
3 H P Lovecraft
2 William Wordsworth
2 Saint John of Climacus
2 Rudolf Steiner
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2 Henry David Thoreau
2 Farid ud-Din Attar
22 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
10 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
8 Whitman - Poems
8 Magick Without Tears
6 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
6 Talks
5 The Secret Doctrine
4 The Practice of Psycho therapy
4 The Future of Man
4 Maps of Meaning
4 Aion
3 Lovecraft - Poems
3 Browning - Poems
3 Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin
3 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
2 Wordsworth - Poems
2 Walden
2 The Red Book Liber Novus
2 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 The Essentials of Education
2 Some Answers From The Mother
2 Raja-Yoga
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Letters On Yoga IV
2 Labyrinths
2 Faust
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
2 Bhakti-Yoga
2 Agenda Vol 04
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
A good many attri butions in other symbolic areas, I feel are subject to the same criticism. The Egyptian Gods have been used with a good deal of carelessness, and without sufficient explanation of motives in assigning them as I did. In a recent edition of Crowley's masterpiece Liber 777 (which au fond is less a reflection of Crowley's mind as a recent critic claimed than a tabulation of some of the material given piecemeal in the Golden Dawn knowledge lectures), he gives for the first time brief explanations of the motives for his attri butions. I too should have been far more explicit in the explanations I used in the case of some of the Gods whose names were used many times, most inadequately, where several paths were concerned. While it is true that the religious coloring of the Egyptian Gods differed from time to time during Egypt's turbulent history, nonetheless a word or two about just that one single point could have served a useful purpose.
Some of the passages in the book force me today to emphasize that so far as the Qabalah is concerned, it could and should be employed without binding to it the partisan qualities of any one particular religious faith. This goes as much for Judaism as it does for Christianity. Neither has much intrinsic usefulness where this scientific scheme is concerned. If some students feel hurt by this statement, that cannot be helped. The day of most contemporary faiths is over; they have been more of a curse than a boon to mankind. Nothing that I say here, however, should reflect on the peoples concerned, those who accept these religions. They are merely unfortunate. The religion itself is worn out and indeed is dying.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He gave me a lecture. He did not say so but I think You
asked him to come to my room.
--
come and lecture me. Can't You tell me directly what
is necessary? Am I not here with You? Am I so far
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Naturally, those in whom the mind is dominant can lecture
their body and provide it with all the reasons needed to overcome
0 1960-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
They came to see their son (son, son-in-law, nephew anyway, its the same person) about some businesssome money matter. Then one of them asked to see me. I thought they would simply send some womannot at all: the whole group, face to face and in a circle, and they began lecturing me on business! So I had some fun. Once they had their say (they werent moving, they were planted there), I told them, Listen, since you are here, it must be for SOMETHING! And then I gave them a lecture. But just imagine, one of them was so shaken that he asked to see me again this morning. The one who was shaken wore a handsome pink turban.
So I said, All right, let him come.
0 1961-07-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
While walking in my room, a series of invocations or prayers have come to me2 (I didnt choose themthey were dictated to me) in which I implore the Lord to manifest his Perfection (and I am quite aware of how foolish this expression is, but it does correspond to an aspiration).3 When I say manifest, I mean to manifest in our physical, material world Im asking for the transformation of this world. And the moment I utter one of these invocations, the sense of the particular approach it represents is there; thats why I am now able to give such a lecture on PerfectionPerfection is one of these approaches. Manifest this, I tell Him, Manifest that, manifest Your Perfection. (The series is very long and it takes me quite a while to go through it all.) Well, each time I say Manifest Your Perfection, I have an awareness of what constitutes Perfectionit is something global.
Its like the word purityone could lecture endlessly on the difference between divine purity and what people call purity. Divine purity (at the lowest level) is to admit but one influence the divine Influence (but this is at the lowest level, and already terribly distorted). Divine purity means that only the Divine existsnothing else. It is perfectly pureonly the Divine exists, nothing other than He.
And so on.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You must not think from all this lecture that I despair of the future of Bengal. I too hope, as they say, that this time a great light will manifest itself in Bengal. Still I have tried to show the other side of the shield, where the fault is, the error, the deficiency. If these remain, the light will not be a great light and it will not be permanent.
The meaning of this extraordinarily long talk is that I too am packing my bag. But I believe that this bundle is like the net of St. Peter, only crammed with the catch of the Infinite. I am not going to open the bag now. If I do that before its time, all would escape. Neither am I going back to Bengal now, not because Bengal is not ready, but because I am not ready. If the unripe goes amidst the unripe what work can he do?5
0 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A mantra given by a guru is only the power to realize the experience of the discoverer of the mantra. The power is automatically there, because the sound contains the experience. I saw that once in Paris, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didnt even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced yoga for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lecture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light. I was probably the only one to notice it. I said to myself, Well! Then I didnt give it any more thought, I forgot about the story. But as it happened, the experience recurred in two or three different countries, with different people, and every time there was the sound OM, I would suddenly see the place fill with that same light. So I understood. That sound contains the vibration of thousands and thousands of years of spiritual aspiration there is in it the entire aspiration of men towards the Supreme. And the power is automatically there, because the experience is there.
Its the same with my mantra. When I wanted to translate the end of my mantra, Glory to You, O Lord, into Sanskrit, I asked for Nolinis help. He brought his Sanskrit translation, and when he read it to me, I immediately saw that the power was therenot because Nolini put his power into it (!), God knows he had no intention of giving me a mantra! But the power was there because my experience was there. We made a few adjustments and modifications, and thats the japa I do now I do it all the time, while sleeping, while walking, while eating, while working, all the time.1 And thats how a mantra has life: when it wells up all the time, spontaneously, like the cry of your beingthere is no need of effort or concentration: its your natural cry. Then it has full power, it is alive. It must well up from within. No guru can give you that.
0 1963-11-27, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know, that Russian woman who went up into the stratosphere2 (she went around the earth several times, I dont know how many), anyway she came on a visit to India and gave a lecture somewhere about her journey. And she said (in a very lovely way, it seems, I dont know her exact words) that she saw the earth from up there and that it was so beautiful, so magnificent! And she made this reflection: From up there, there are no demarcations between countries, it makes so harmonious a unity that it seems unthinkable men should fight among themselves. Thats lovely.
Of course, as soon as you go high enough, theres a unity, a whole, which is so beautiful and without divisionsWhy do men fight?
0 1966-11-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I remember, once, it was with Madame David-Neel. Its very interesting. She came to give a lecture (I wasnt acquainted with her, thats where I met her for the first time), I think it was at the Theosophical Society (I forget). I went to the lecture, and while she was speaking, I saw Buddha I saw him clearly: not above her head, a little to the side. He was present. So after the lecture, I was introduced to her (I didnt know the kind of woman she was!), and I said to her, Oh, Madam, during your speech I saw Buddha present. She answered me (in a furious tone), Impossible! Buddha is in Nirvana! (Mother laughs) Oho! Better keep quiet! I thought.
But he really was there, whatever she thought!
0 1970-05-23, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The country seems to be falling apart, so there [in Delhi] they asked me what should be done. I told them that this Centenary [of Sri Aurobindo, in 1972] has come ON PURPOSE. Its certainly something thats coming now because the ONLY salvation for the country, the ONLY thing that can unify it, is for it to adopt Sri Aurobindos ideal for the countryhe had a plan, he very clearly saw how the country should be organized, he said it to me. Its there, if one reads his books seriously, one can see it. So I said that things should be so organized that THROUGHOUT India there should be study groups, libraries, lectures, anything whatever, so the whole country should know Sri Aurobindos thought and will. And the Centenary is an excellent opportunity. They asked me, Whats the way out of this chaos? On my advice, Indira has been trying to surround herself with people of value. (She had me told that she had forgotten questions of party and wants to surround herself with capable people.) The difficulty is to find upright people. So they need to be educated they dont even have a NOTION of how they can be! So I said, This Centenary should be organized right now, at once, like something covering the whole country on the occasion of the Centenary. And in what Sri Aurobindo wrote, they will find all they need to organize the country, and much better, I tell them, infinitely better than what I may say, because he knew the country infinitely better than I do, and the mental formation and everything.
People need occasions to do things. But this seems to have been wonderfully prepared ON PURPOSE.
0 1972-03-29a, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Your reply to the questions of a Swedish magazine regarding whether religions have in fact promoted the conditions of tolerance and understanding among men happened to fall into my hands just as I have started giving a series of lectures on your works at the International University Center of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. This coincidence, along with a long-standing familiarity with your books, prompt me to write you a few words about another testimony, that of Sri Aurobindo, which I am sure you are aware of, but whose work, still incompletely translated in French, remains poorly known in Europe.
I seem to find in Sri Aurobindos work an answer that meets yours and develops it for the question is indeed to reinstate the gods IN man after having reinstated the demons, as you rightly stated in the Swedish article but I also find there an answer to the agonizing question constantly raised by your characters from The Royal Way to The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Indeed, all of them seek a deeper notion in man that will deliver them from death and solitudethis is THE question of the West, to which Sri Aurobindo brings a solution at once dynamic and illuminating. Hence, I am taking the liberty of sending by surface mail one of Sri Aurobindos books in the original English entitled The Human Cycle. I hope it will interest you.
02.13 - Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So it was natural and almost inevitablewritten among the stars that both should meet once more on this physical earth. Sri Aurobindo had been in complete retirement seeing none except, of course, his attendants. He was coming out only four times in the year to give silent darshan to his devotees and a few others who sought for it. It was in the year 1928. Tagore was then on a tour to the South. He expressed to Sri Aurobindo by letter his desire for a personal meeting. Sri Aurobindo naturally agreed to receive him. Tagore reached Pondicherry by steamer, and I had the privilege to see him on board the ship and escort him to the Ashram. The Mother welcomed him at the door of Sri Aurobindo's apartments and led him to Sri Aurobindo. Tagore already knew the Mother, for both were together in Japan and stayed in the same house and she attended some of his lectures in that country. It may be interesting to mention here that Tagore requested the Mother to take charge of the Visva Bharati, for evidently he felt that the future of his dear institution would be in sure hands. But the Mother could not but decline since it was her destiny to be at another place and another work.
What transpired between them is not for me to say, the meeting being a private one. But I may quote here what Tagore himself wrote about it subsequently:
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
2) It may be that later on you will want a copy of Eight lectures on Yoga so I am putting a copy aside for you in case you should want it.
3) With regard to the O.T.O., I believe I can find you a typescript of all the official documents. If so, I will let you have them to read, and you can make up your mind as to whether you wish to affiliate to the Third Degree of the Order. I should consequently, in the case of your deciding to affiliate, go with you though the script of the Rituals and explain the meaning of the whole thing; communicating, in addition, the real secret and significant knowledge of which ordinary Masonry is not possessed.
--
It seems to me that you should confine yourself very closely to the actual work in front of you. At the present moment, of course, this includes a good deal of general study; but my point is that the terms employed in that study should always be capable of precise definition. I am not sure whether you have my Little Essays Toward Truth. The first essay in the book entitled "Man" gives a full account of the five principles which go to make up Man according to the Qabalistic system. I have tried to define these terms as accurately as possible, and I think you will find them, in any case, clearer than those to which you have become accustomed with the Eastern systems. In India, by the way, no attempt is ever made to use these vague terms. They always have a very clear idea of what is meant by words like "Buddhi," "Manas" and the like. Attempts at translation are very unsatisfactory. I find that even with such a simple matter as the "Eight limbs of Yoga," as you will see when you come to read my Eight lectures.
I am very pleased with your illustrations; that is excellent practice for you. Presently you have to make talismans, and a Lamen for yourself, and even to devise a seal to serve as what you might call a magical coat-of-arms, and all this sort of thing is very helpful.
--
No, there is this factor in all success: self-confidence. If we analyze this, we find that it means that one is aware that all one's mental and physical faculties are working harmoniously. The deadliest and subtlest enemy of that feeling is anxiety about the result; the finest gauze of doubt is enough to dim one's vision, to throw the entire field out of focus. Hence, even to be aware that there is a result in prospect must militate against that serenity of spirit which is the essence of self-confidence. As you will know, all our automatic physiological functions are deranged if one is aware of This then, is the difficulty, to enjoy consciously while not disturbing the process involved. The obvious physical case is the sexual act: perhaps its chief importance is just that it is a type of this exceptional spiritual-mental condition. I hope, however, that you will remember what I have said on the subject in paragraphs 1517 of my 3rd lecture on Yoga for Yellowbellies (pp. 71-72); there is a way of obtaining ecstacy from the most insignificant physiological function. Observe that in transferring the whole consciousness to (say) one's little finger or big toe is not trying to interfere with the normal exercise of its activities, but only to realize what is going on in the organism, the exquisite pleasure of a function in its normal activity. With a little imagination one can conceive the analogical case of the Universe itself; and, still less fettered by even the mildest limitation which material symbols necessarily (however little) suggest, "Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; ..." (AL, II, 9).
Is it too bold to suggest that the gradual merging of all these Ways into an interwoven unity may be taken as one mode of presentation of the Accomplishment of the Great Work itself?
1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
I have taken pains to be as plain as possible in the course of the lectures to make the sublime Truth accessible to everybody, although it has been a hard task sometimes to find such simple words as are necessary for the understanding of all the readers. I must leave it to the judgment of all of you, whether or not my efforts have been successful. At certain points I have been forced to repeat myself deliberately to emphasize some important sentences and to spare the reader any going back to a particular page.
There have been many complaints of people interested in the occult sciences that they had never got any chance at all to be initiated by a personal master or leader (guru).
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Some of the courses I was attending at this time were taught in large lecture theaters, where the students
were seated in descending rows, row after row. In one of these courses Introduction to Clinical
--
some unwitting individual and listen to the professor speak. At some point during the lecture, I would
unfailingly feel the urge to stab the point of my pen into the neck of the person in front of me. This impulse
1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
32. The Handwritten Draft has: Dear Friends (p. I). The Draft has Dear Friends! (p. I). In his lecture at the ETH on June 14, 1935, Jung noted: A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us (Barbara Hannah, ed., Modern
Psychology Vol. 1 and 2: Notes on lectures given at the Eidgenssiche Technische Hochschule,
Zrich, by Prof Dr. C. G. jung, October 1933- july 1935, 2nd ed. [Zrich: privately printed,
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli. 43
82 The symbolic process is an experience in images and of
--
In the short space of a lecture I must content myself with
giving only a few examples of archetypes. I have chosen the ones
--
process in which they appear. Since this lecture was first pub-
lished, the figures of the shadow, anima, and wise old man,
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a Rodgers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the _poor_ student studies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred modern improvements; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
--
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not Englands best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a mans uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the hea then to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If any thing ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,for that is the seat of sympathy,he forthwith sets about reforming the world.
--
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.
1.01 - MASTER AND DISCIPLE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Tell me, do you know of a certain Mr. Cook who has come to Calcutta? Is it true that he is giving lectures? Once Keshab took me on a steamer, and this Mr. Cook, too was in the party."
M: "Yes, sir, I have heard something like that; but I have never been to his lectures. I don't know much about him."
Sri Ramakrishna on M.'s marriage
--
MASTER (sharply): "That's the one hobby of you Calcutta people - giving lectures and bringing others to the light! Nobody ever stops to consider how to get the light himself.
Who are you to teach others?
1.01 - Necessity for knowledge of the whole human being for a genuine education., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Zen
In the following lectures, I will have much more to say about such knowledge of human nature. But first, let me point out that true knowledge of human nature doesnt come from merely look- ing at an isolated individual with three aspects: body, soul, and spirit. Knowledge of human nature primarily tries to keep sight of what happens among human beings during earthly life.
When one human being encounters another, a fully conscious knowledge of each others being doesnt develop between them such a thing would be absurd. We couldnt begin to interact socially if we were to view one another such that we ask: Whats going on in that other person? But we all carry an unconscious knowledge4 of the other within ourselves as unconscious perceptions, feelings, and, most importantly, impulses that underlie the will. We will see that knowledge of human nature has suffered a great deal in the modern world, and this has given rise to many social evils. In a sense, however, knowledge of human beings has only withdrawn to deeper levels of the unconscious than ever before. Nevertheless, it is still available to us, since, if it werent, we would pass each other with no means of understanding one another.
--
Thus, we see that a fundamental issue in teaching and educa- tion is the question of who the teacher is. What must really live in the children, what must vibrate and well up into their very hearts, wills, and eventually into their intellect, lives initially in the teach- ers. It arises simply through who they are, through their unique nature, character, and attitude of soul, and through what they bring the children out of their own self-development. So we can see how it is only a true knowledge of human nature, cultivated comprehensively, that can serve as the foundation for a true art of teaching and fulfill the living needs of education. Im eager to pursue these matters further in the lectures that follow.
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
I cannot, within the compass of a lecture, describe all the motifs that
crop up in the process of individuationwhen, that is to say, the material is
--
details of this development would far exceed the limits of a lecture. I must
therefore rest content with having given you at least a general survey of the
1.01 - the Call to Adventure, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on Psycho-Analysis (translated by
James Strachey, Standard Edition, XVI; London: The Hogarth Press, 1963),
1.026 - The Poets, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
136. They said, “It is the same for us, whether you lecture us, or do not lecture.
137. This is nothing but morals of the ancients.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
others did not they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely spoke of unshameful
death, a priest academician about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers about something in the area of
1.02 - Prana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
In this universe there is one continuous substance on every plane of existence. Physically this universe is one: there is no difference between the sun and you. The scientist will tell you it is only a fiction to say the contrary. There is no real difference between the table and me; the table is one point in the mass of matter, and I another point. Each form represents, as it were, one whirlpool in the infinite ocean of matter, of which not one is constant. Just as in a rushing stream there may be millions of whirlpools, the water in each of which is different every moment, turning round and round for a few seconds, and then passing out, replaced by a fresh quantity, so the whole universe is one constantly changing mass of matter, in which all forms of existence are so many whirlpools. A mass of matter enters into one whirlpool, say a human body, stays there for a period, becomes changed, and goes out into another, say an animal body this time, from which again after a few years, it enters into another whirlpool, called a lump of mineral. It is a constant change. Not one body is constant. There is no such thing as my body, or your body, except in words. Of the one huge mass of matter, one point is called a moon, another a sun, another a man, another the earth, another a plant, another a mineral. Not one is constant, but everything is changing, matter eternally concreting and disintegrating. So it is with the mind. Matter is represented by the ether; when the action of Prana is most subtle, this very ether, in the finer state of vibration, will represent the mind and there it will be still one unbroken mass. If you can simply get to that subtle vibration, you will see and feel that the whole universe is composed of subtle vibrations. Sometimes certain drugs have the power to take us, while as yet in the senses, to that condition. Many of you may remember the celebrated experiment of Sir Humphrey Davy, when the laughing gas overpowered him how, during the lecture, he remained motionless, stupefied and after that, he said that the whole universe was made up of ideas. For, the time being, as it were, the gross vibrations had ceased, and only the subtle vibrations which he called ideas, were present to him. He could only see the subtle vibrations round him; everything had become thought; the whole universe was an ocean of thought, he and everyone else had become little thought whirlpools.
Thus, even in the universe of thought we find unity, and at last, when we get to the Self, we know that that Self can only be One. Beyond the vibrations of matter in its gross and subtle aspects, beyond motion there is but One. Even in manifested motion there is only unity. These facts can no more be denied. Modern physics also has demonstrated that the sum total of the energies in the universe is the same throughout. It has also been proved that this sum total of energy exists in two forms. It becomes potential, toned down, and calmed, and next it comes out manifested as all these various forces; again it goes back to the quiet state, and again it manifests. Thus it goes on evolving and involving through eternity. The control of this Prana, as before stated, is what is called Pranayama.
--
There is a mistake constantly made by Faith-healers: they think that faith directly heals a man. But faith alone does not cover all the ground. There are diseases where the worst symptoms are that the patient never thinks that he has that disease. That tremendous faith of the patient is itself one symptom of the disease, and usually indicates that he will die quickly. In such cases the principle that faith cures does not apply. If it were faith alone that cured, these patients also would be cured. It is by the Prana that real curing comes. The pure man, who has controlled the Prana, has the power of bringing it into a certain state of vibration, which can be conveyed to others, arousing in them a similar vibration. You see that in everyday actions. I am talking to you. What am I trying to do? I am, so to say, bringing my mind to a certain state of vibration, and the more I succeed in bringing it to that state, the more you will be affected by what I say. All of you know that the day I am more enthusiastic, the more you enjoy the lecture; and when I am less enthusiastic, you feel lack of interest.
The gigantic will-powers of the world, the world-movers, can bring their Prana into a high state of vibration, and it is so great and powerful that it catches others in a moment, and thousands are drawn towards them, and half the world think as they do. Great prophets of the world had the most wonderful control of the Prana, which gave them tremendous will-power; they had brought their Prana to the highest state of motion, and this is what gave them power to sway the world. All manifestations of power arise from this control. Men may not know the secret, but this is the one explanation. Sometimes in your own body the supply of Prana gravitates more or less to one part; the balance is disturbed, and when the balance of Prana is disturbed, what we call disease is produced. To take away the superfluous Prana, or to supply the Prana that is wanting, will be curing the disease. That again is Pranayama to learn when there is more or less Prana in one part of the body than there should be. The feelings will become so subtle that the mind will feel that there is less Prana in the toe or the finger than there should be, and will possess the power to supply it. These are among the various functions of Pranayama. They have to be learned slowly and gradually, and as you see, the whole scope of Raja-Yoga is really to teach the control and direction in different planes of the Prana. When a man has concentrated his energies, he masters the Prana that is in his body. When a man is meditating, he is also concentrating the Prana.
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Sankhyas, as I told you in some of the previous lectures, and
here again I will remind you of the cosmology of the Sankhya
1.02 - The Child as growing being and the childs experience of encountering the teacher., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Zen
Now, people have a lot to say about proofs with no clear idea of what that means. I cant present a detailed lecture on the methods of proof in the various spheres of life and knowledge; but Id like to clarify the matter by way of the following analogy.
What do people mean when they say that something requires proof ? The whole trend of human evolution since the fourteenth century has been to validate judgments through visual observation, that is to say, through sense perception. It was a very different matter before the current era, or before the fourteenth century. But we fail to realize today that our ancestors had a very different view of the world. In a certain sense we are arrogant when we consider the development that has occurred in recent centuries. We look condescendingly at what people did during the Middle Ages, for example, considering them childish and primitive. But its an age about which we really know nothing and call the Dark Ages. Try to imagine how our successors will speak of usif theyre as arrogant in their thinking as we are! If they turn out to be as conceited, well seem just as childish to them as medieval people appear to us.
--
This is only another way of expressing what I said in yester- days lecture, namely, that during the first period of life the child is in the highest degree and by its whole nature a being of sense. The child is like a sense organ. The surrounding impressions ripple, echo and sound through the whole organism because the child isnt so inwardly bound up with the body as is the case in later life, but lives in the environment with its freer spiritual and soul nature. Hence the child is receptive to all the impressions coming from the environment.
Now, whats the relation between the human constitution as a whole and what we receive from the father and mother strictly through heredity? If we study human development with vision that truly creates ideas instead of mere proofs as describeda vision that looks at the spiritual and the evolutionary aspects of human naturewe find that everything in the organism depends on hereditary forces in exactly the same way as the first, so-called baby teeth do. We only need to perceive, with real acuity, the dif- ference in the ways the second teeth and the first are formed. In this way, we have a tangible expression of the processes occurring in human development between birth and the change of teeth.
--
Thus, from week to week, month to month, year to year, a true knowledge of human nature will help us read the develop- ing child like a book that tells us what needs to be done in our teaching. The curriculum needs to reproduce what we read in the evolutionary process of the human being. Specific ways that we can do this will be addressed in coming lectures.
1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
l [Originally given as a lecture to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, London, on Oct. 19, 1936, and published in the Hospital's Journal,
--
sible in the framework of a lecture. I have repeatedly tried it at
the risk of sending one half of my audience to sleep.
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Swarthmore lecture, Science and the Unseen World.!
" I can only say that physical science has turned its back on all such models, regarding them now rather as a hindrance to the apprehension of the truth behind phenomena. . . . And if to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the rether or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or flywheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that;
1.02 - The Shadow, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
2 The contents of this and the following chapter are taken from a lecture deliv-
ered to the Swiss Society for Practical Psychology, in Zurich, 1948. The material
1.02 - To Zen Monks Kin and Koku, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
This letter, in which Hakuin declines an invitation to lecture on the Vimalakirti Sutra, can be dated from internal evidence to 1729. As one of very few letters that can be dated confidently to Hakuin's forties, it gives us a rare glimpse of Shin-ji during the early years of Hakuin's residency. Neither
Kin or Koku, nor the name of the temple issuing the invitation to Hakuin, have been identified, although the temple was no doubt located close by, probably in Suruga Province.
--
MY HUMBLEST APPRECIATION for the letter Brother Rai recently delivered to me containing your request to conduct a lecture meeting on the Beyond Comprehension Sutra, together with the list of expected participants. While I seriously doubt you can rely on a shuffling jackass to perform like a thorough-bred stallion, or hope for an old crow to start caroling like a celestial phoenix, I am nonetheless sincerely grateful that you even remembered this boorish rustic and thought it worthwhile to make a sincere effort to assist in his upbringing. I have no doubt that you were inspired by a deep aspiration to promote the teaching of the Dharma.
I, alas, am not a superior man. I have neither wisdom nor virtue. I am sure you have heard about the adversities we've been experiencing at Shin-ji. After my first eight years here as head priest, and a great deal of trouble, we finally succeeded in striking a vein of water and reviving the dried-up old well. Now four years and a great deal of additional hardship later, we have managed to finish re thatching the leaky roofs. I still do not have a student able to aid me in running the affairs of the temple, and there are no parishioners to turn to for financial help.
More to the point, even after scrutinizing my heart from corner to corner, I am unable to come up with a single notion that I could communicate to participants at such a lecture meeting, much less hold forth on the Vimilakirti Sutra's wonderful teaching of nonduality. In view of this, and after repeated and agonizing self-examination, I am afraid I have no choice but to decline the high honor you have sought to bestow upon me. Even as I write this, my eyes are wet with tears and my body drenched in a thick, shame-induced sweat. Certainly there is no lack of veteran priests in your own area, any one of whom I am sure would be capable of carrying out the task you propose.
Asking your forgiveness in this matter, I am, yours truly, [Hakuin]
--
-it is interesting to find him here at the age of forty-three, at the start of his teaching career, showing such reluctance to accept a teaching assignment. Evidently, Hakuin did not lecture at the request of another temple until eight years after this. His text was the Blue Cliff Record.
1.03 - Reading, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of
Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers?
1.03 - Supernatural Aid, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
to Thomas Carlyle's idea of the Hero King, as "Ableman" (On Heroes, HeroWorship and The Heroic in History, lecture VI).
SUPERNATURAL AID
1.03 - To Layman Ishii, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
This letter is perhaps the earliest written enunciation of these themes, preceding by almost a decade their initial appearance in print, in Talks Introductory to lectures on the Record of Hsi-keng
(1743). Several passages in the present letter appear almost verbatim in the printed version of the
1.04 - ADVICE TO HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"First of all set up God in the shrine of your heart, and then deliver lectures as much as you like. How will the mere repetition of 'Brahma' profit you if you are not imbued with discrimination and dispassion? It is the empty sound of a conchshell.
"There lived in a village a young man named Padmalochan. People used to call him 'Podo', for short. In this village there was a temple in a very dilapidated condition. It contained no image of God. Awattha and other plants sprang up on the ruins of its walls. Bats lived inside, and the floor was covered with dust and the droppings of the bats. The people of the village had stopped visiting the temple. One day after dusk the villagers heard the sound of a conchshell from the direction of the temple. They thought perhaps someone had installed an image in the shrine and was performing the evening worship. One of them softly opened the door and saw Padmalochan standing in a corner, blowing the conch. No image had been set up. The temple hadn't been swept or washed. And filth and dirt lay everywhere. Then he shouted to Podo: You have set up no image here,
--
"First of all invoke the Deity, and then give lectures to your heart's content. First of all dive deep. Plunge to the bottom and gather up the gems. Then you may do other things. But nobody wants to plunge. People are without spiritual discipline and prayer, without renunciation and dispassion. They learn a few words and immediately start to deliver lectures. It is difficult to teach others. Only if a man gets a comm and from God, after realizing Him, is he entitled to teach."
Thus conversing, the Master came to the west end of the verandah. M stood by his side. Sri Ramakrishna had repeated again and again that God cannot be realized without discrimination and renunciation. This made M. extremely worried. He had married and was then a young man of twenty-eight, educated in college in the Western way. Having a sense of duty, he asked himself, "Do discrimination and dispassion mean giving up 'woman and gold'?" He was really at a loss to know what to do.
1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal, I need not seek connections. I was able to link the picture up with the sea of blood I had previously fantasized about. / Though I could not then grasp the significance of the hero killed, soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions" (Analytical Psychology, p. 48). (The killing of Siegfried occurs below in ch. 7.) Jung also anonymously cited and discussed this fantasy in his ETH lecture on
June 14, 1935 (Modern Psychology, vols. 1. and 2, p. 223).
--
1912, and it had a strong impact on his thinking. In his foreword to his Fordham University lectures, Jung stated that he had taken James's pragmatic rule as his guiding principle (CW 4, p.
86). See my Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, pp. 57-61.
--
96. In his lecture at the ETH on June 14, 1935, Jung commented (partially in reference to this fantasy, which he referred to anonymously): "The sun motif appears in many places and times and the meaning is always the same-that a new consciousness has been born. It is the light of illumination which is projected into space. This is a psychological event; the medical term
"hallucination" makes no sense in psychology: / The Katabasis plays a very important role in the
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
1 Unpublished. Peking, February 22, 1941. lecture delivered at the French Em-
bassy, on the third of March of the same year.
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
I have purposely avoided loading my lecture with theory, hence much
must remain obscure and unexplained. But, in order to make the pictures
--
therapeutic aims and intentions within the broad framework of a lecture. It
can be no more than an incentive to thought, and I shall be quite content if
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
unsupported in space, endlessly circling the sun. After the lecture, an old woman approaches the podium
and says:
--
Absurd, madam? the lecturer inquired. Whatever do you mean?
It is well known fact, replied the old woman, that the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle.
1.04 - THE STUDY (The Compact), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
And when the lecture-halls receive me,
Seeing, hearing, and thinking leave me.
1.04 - To the Priest of Rytan-ji, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
Ttmi Province to lecture on a Chinese Zen text, Precious Lessons of the Zen School. He was in the middle of his second decade of teaching at Shin-ji, having two years before completed a highly successful meeting that had established his reputation as one of the foremost Zen teachers in the country, and had also attracted a large assembly of trainees to the temple. Hakuin now seems more willing to accept requests from other temples to conduct lecture meetings.
It was a convention to address letters of this type to the attendant rather than to the head priest himself. Hakuin also mentions that this is the third time he has received a letter from the attendant, alluding to a famous episode from the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history when the warlord
--
Ttmi Province to lecture on Precious Lessons of the Zen School."
But we learn from Trei's draft manuscript of the Chronological Biography that the meeting was actually held in autumn to commemorate the 650th anniversary of the temple's founding, and that "a hundred monks accompanied Hakuin on the journey to Ttmi to take part in the meeting." Precious
Lessons of the Zen School is a late twelfth-century work Hakuin frequently used as a text for lectures.
It is made up of words, instructions, and episodes of eminent Chinese Zen priests.
1.05 - Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
This eye-opener of the aspirant after religion is the teacher. With the teacher, therefore, our relationship is the same as that between an ancestor and his descendant. Without faith, humility, submission, and veneration in our hearts towards our religious teacher, there cannot be any growth of religion in us; and it is a significant fact that, where this kind of relation between the teacher and the taught prevails, there alone gigantic spiritual men are growing; while in those countries which have neglected to keep up this kind of relation the religious teacher has become a mere lecturer, the teacher expecting his five dollars and the person taught expecting his brain to be filled with the teacher's words, and each going his own way after this much has been done. Under such circumstances spirituality becomes almost an unknown quantity. There is none to transmit it and none to have it transmitted to.
Religion with such people becomes business; they think they can obtain it with their dollars. Would to God that religion could be obtained so easily! But unfortunately it cannot be.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Jaeger, W. (1968). The theology of the early Greek philosophers: The Gifford lectures 1936. London:
Oxford University Press.
1.05 - THE MASTER AND KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
How forceful are the words of such a teacher! They can move mountains. But mere lectures? People will listen to them for a few days and then forget them. They will never act upon mere words.
"At Kamarpukur there is a small lake called the Haldarpukur. Certain people used to befoul its banks every day. Others who came there in the morning to ba the would abuse the offenders loudly. But next morning they would find the same thing. The nuisance didn't stop. (All laugh.) The villagers finally informed the authorities about it. A constable was sent, who put up a notice on the bank which read: 'Commit no nuisance.'
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
seriously ... Over the course of two lectures to the Florentine
Academy he used mathematical arguments to demonstrate
1.06 - Incarnate Teachers and Incarnation, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
No man can really see God except through these human manifestations. If we try to see God otherwise, we make for ourselves a hideous caricature of Him and believe the caricature to be no worse than the original. There is a story of an ignorant man who was asked to make an image of the God Shiva, and who, after days of hard struggle, manufactured only the image of a monkey. So whenever we try to think of God as He is in His absolute perfection, we invariably meet with the most miserable failure, because as long as we are men, we cannot conceive Him as anything higher than man. The time will come when we shall transcend our human nature and know Him as He is; but as long as we are men, we must worship Him in man and as man. Talk as you may, try as you may, you cannot think of God except as a man. You may deliver great intellectual discourses on God and on all things under the sun, become great rationalists and prove to your satisfaction that all these accounts of the Avataras of God as man are nonsense. But let us come for a moment to practical common sense. What is there behind this kind of remarkable intellect? Zero, nothing, simply so much froth. When next you hear a man delivering a great intellectual lecture against this worship of the Avataras of God, get hold of him and ask what his idea of God is, what he understands by "omnipotence", "omnipresence", and all similar terms, beyond the spelling of the words. He really means nothing by them; he cannot formulate as their meaning any idea unaffected by his own human nature; he is no better off in this matter than the man in the street who has not read a single book. That man in the street, however, is quiet and does not disturb the peace of the world, while this big talker creates disturbance and misery among mankind.
Religion is, after all, realisation, and we must make the sharpest distinction between talk; and intuitive experience. What we experience in the depths of our souls is realisation. Nothing indeed is so uncommon as common sense in regard to this matter.
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
This lecture is divided into three parts:
One. The place of living planets in the Universe. Small-
--
pating the latter parts of this lecture.
First, in the multitude of things comprising the world, an ex-
--
2 I need hardly point out that for the purpose of this lecture, which does not
seek to go outside the field of scientific observation, only the succession and in-
--
guage of this lecture, that, Matter having attained in Homo sapiens
its maximum of centro-complexity on Earth, the process of super-
1.06 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
(To Shivanath and the other Brahmo devotees) "Can you tell me why you dwell so much on the powers and glories of God? I asked the same thing of Keshab Sen. One day Keshab and his party came to the temple garden at Dakshineswar. I told them I wanted to hear how they lectured. A meeting was arranged in the paved courtyard above the bathing-ghat on the Ganges, where Keshab gave a talk. He spoke very well. I went into a trance. After the lecture I said to Keshab, 'Why do you so often say such things as: "O
God, what beautiful flowers Thou hast made! O God, Thou hast created the heavens, the stars, and the ocean!" and so on?' Those who love splendour themselves are fond of dwelling on God's splendour.
--
One cannot grasp this without tapasya and the company of holy men. What is the use of merely reciting the written parts for the drum? It is very difficult to put them into practice on the instrument. What can be accomplished by a mere lecture? It is austerity that is necessary. By that alone can one comprehend.
"You asked about caste distinctions. There is only one way to remove them, and that is by love of God. Lovers of God have no caste. Through this divine love the untouchable becomes pure, the pariah no longer remains a pariah. Chaitanya embraced all, including the pariahs.
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
a short lecture, to say nothing of all the therapeutic intricacies that are far
from clear even to the shrewdest professional.
--
would exceed the compass of my lecture, and I must therefore refrain. I
trust, however, that the little I have been privileged to say has thrown some
1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Another instance in an entirely new direction is necessary perhaps to demonstrate the manner in which Qabalistic knowledge may be applied. In his Swarthmore lecture,
Science and the Unseen World, Prof. A. S. Eddington pointed out that " out of the electric charges dispersed in the primitive chaos ninety-two different kinds of matter - ninety-two chemical elements - have been built. ... At root the diversity of the ninety-two elements reflects the diversity of the integers from one to ninety-two because the chemical characteristics of element No. 11 (sodium) arise from the fact that it has the power at low temperature of gathering round it eleven negative electric charges ; those of No. 12
--
At this point I shall leave the Swarthmore lecture to ask the reader to consider with me a highly significant passage taken from Sir James Jeans' recent work, The Mysterious
Universe. I quote from page 8 :
--
In his Swarthmore lecture, Eddington continues an identical theme, stating that the electronic structure of the element carbon is responsible for, and provides the physical basis of, life.
Now this conception of things very closely approximates that adopted by the Qabalists. For the moment I shall deal solely with the element carbon, leaving the reader to work out for himself the correspondences of sodium and mag- nesium mentioned by Eddington. The manifestation of
1.07 - THE MASTER AND VIJAY GOSWAMI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER (to Vijay): "The task of a religious teacher is indeed difficult. One cannot teach men without a direct comm and from God. People won't listen to you if you teach without such authority. Such teaching has no force behind it. One must first of all attain God through spiritual discipline or some other means. Thus armed with authority from God, one can deliver lectures.
"After receiving the comm and from God, one can be a teacher and give lectures anywhere. He who receives authority from God also receives power from Him. Only then can he perform the difficult task of a teacher.
"An insignificant tenant was once engaged in a lawsuit with a big landlord. People realized that there was a powerful man behind the tenant. Perhaps another big landlord was directing the case from behind. Man is an insignificant creature. He cannot fulfil the difficult task of a teacher without receiving power direct from God."
1.08 - EVENING A SMALL, NEATLY KEPT CHAMBER, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
To the lecture-hall you were forced to go,
As if stood before you, gray and loath,
1.09 - Concentration - Its Spiritual Uses, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
Realisation is real religion, all the rest is only preparation hearing lectures, or reading books, or reasoning is merely preparing the ground; it is not religion. Intellectual assent and intellectual dissent are not religion. The central idea of the Yogis is that just as we come in direct contact with objects of the senses, so religion even can be directly perceived in a far more intense sense. The truths of religion, as God and Soul, cannot be perceived by the external senses. I cannot see God with my eyes, nor can I touch Him with my hands, and we also know that neither can we reason beyond the senses. Reason leaves us at a point quite indecisive; we may reason all our lives, as the world has been doing for thousands of years, and the result is that we find we are incompetent to prove or disprove the facts of religion. What we perceive directly we take as the basis, and upon that basis we reason. So it is obvious that reasoning has to run within these bounds of perception. It can never go beyond. The whole scope of realisation, therefore, is beyond sense-perception. The Yogis say that man can go beyond his direct sense-perception, and beyond his reason also. Man has in him the faculty, the power, of transcending his intellect even, a power which is in every being, every creature. By the practice of Yoga that power is aroused, and then man transcends the ordinary limits of reason, and directly perceives things which are beyond all reason.
50. The resulting impression from this Samadhi obstructs all other impressions.
1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
10 lecture delivered in New York and published in the Scientific Monthly, 1940.
162 THE FUTURE OF MAN
1.10 - The Revolutionary Yogi, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Such are the mental, vital, physical and psychic discoveries that Sri Aurobindo pursued alone, step by step, between the ages of twenty and thirty, simply by following the thread of consciousness. The remarkable thing is that he practiced yoga in circumstances and places where one would usually not do yoga: while giving his lectures in French or English at the State College of Baroda, during his work at the court of the Maharaja, and more and more in the midst of his secret revolutionary activities. The hours of the night that were not devoted to studying his mother tongue or Sanskrit or to political work were spent writing poetry. "Aurobindo had the habit of writing poetry till late into the night," his Bengali teacher recalls, "and consequently he did not get up very early in the morning. . . . He would concentrate for a minute before starting, then the poetry would flow from his pen like a stream." From writing poetry, Sri Aurobindo would pass to his experimental sleep. In 1901, at the age of twenty-nine, he married Mrinalini Devi and tried to share his spiritual life with her. I am experiencing all the signs and symptoms, he wrote to her in a letter found in the archives of the British police. I should like to take you with me along this path. But Mrinalini did not understand him, and Sri Aurobindo would remain alone. We could search Sri Aurobindo's life in vain for those moving or miraculous anecdotes that adorn the lives of great sages and mystics, in vain for sensational yogic methods;
everything seemed so ordinary, apparently, that nothing attracted one's attention, just as in life itself. Perhaps he had found more miracles in the ordinary than in the extraordinary: With me all is different, all is uncommon, he wrote in a letter to Mrinalini. All is deep and strange to the eyes that see.103 And perhaps that is what he wants us to discover through his example, his work, his yoga all those unknown riches beneath the ordinary crust. Our lives [are] a deeper mystery than we 103
1.12 - On lying., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
When the demons see that in the very beginning we intend to keep aloof from the witty lecture of a coarse leader, as from an infectious disease, then they try to catch us by two thoughts, suggesting to us: Do not offend the story-teller, or: Do not appear to love God more than they do. Be off! Do not dally, otherwise at the time of your prayer the jokes will recur to your mind. And not only run, but even piously disconcert the bad company by offering for their general attention the thought of death and judgment. For perhaps it is better for you to be sprinkled with a few drops of vainglory, if only you can become a channel of profit for many.
Hypocrisy is the mother of lying and often its purpose. For some define hypocrisy as no other than meditation on falsehood, and an inventor of falsehood which has a reprehensible oath twisted up with it.
1.12 - THE FESTIVAL AT PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"One day when Keshab was here with his disciples, I said to him that I would like to hear him preach. He delivered a lecture in the chandni. Then we all sat by the bathing-ghat and had a long conversation. I said to him: 'It is Bhagavan alone who in one form appears as bhakta, and in another as the Bhagavata. Please repeat "Bhagavata-Bhakta-Bhagavan".' Keshab and his disciples repeated the words. Then I asked him to repeat 'Guru-Krishna-Vaishnava'. Thereupon Keshab said: 'Sir, I should not go so far now.
People will say that I have become an orthodox Hindu.'
1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
82 I owe this idea to a lecture delivered by Professor W. Pauli, in Zurich, on the
archetypal foundations of Kepler's astronomy. Cf. his "The Influence of Arche-
1.14 - Bibliography, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
For translation, see: lectures or Tractates on the Gospel accord-
ing to Saint John, Vol. II. Translated by James Innes. (Works of
--
. "Psychology and Religion" (The Terry lectures). In: Psy-
chology and Religion: West and East, q.v.
1.15 - Index, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Psychology and Religion (The Terry lectures) (1938/1940)
A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity (1942/1948)
--
Analytical Psychology and Education: Three lectures (1926/1946)
The Gifted Child (1943)
1.16 - On Concentration, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
What your really need is the official Instruction in The Equinox, and the very fullest and deepest understanding of Eight lectures on Yoga; but these lectures are so infernally interesting that when I look into the book for something to quote, it carries me away with it. I can't put it down, I forget all about this letter. Rather a back-handed advertisement for Concentration!
The best way is the hardest; to forget all this and start from the beginning as if there had never been anything on the subject written before.
1.16 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M. had been visiting Sri Ramakrishna for the past two years. Since he had been educated along English lines, he had acquired a fondness for Western philosophy and science, and had liked to hear Keshab and other scholars lecture. Sri Ramakrishna would address him now and then as the "Englishman". Since coming to Sri Ramakrishna, M. had lost all relish for lectures and for books written by English scholars. The only thing that appealed to him now was to see the Master day and night, and hear the words that fell from his blessed lips. M. constantly dwelt on certain of Sri Ramakrishna's sayings. The Master had said, "One can certainly see God through the practice of spiritual discipline", and again, "The vision of God is the only goal of human life."
MASTER (to M.): "If you practise only a little, someone will come forward to tell you the right path. Observe the ekadasi.
1.18 - M. AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER (to M.): "Do they only give lectures in the Brahmo Samaj? Or do they also meditate? I understand that they call their service in the temple 'upasana'.
"Keshab at one time thought a great deal of Christianity and the Christian views. At that time, and even before, he belonged to Devendranath Tagore's organization."
1.18 - On insensibility, that is, deadening of the soul and the death of the mind before the death of the body., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
3. He who has lost sensibility is a brainless philosopher, a self-condemned commentator, a self-contradictory windbag, a blind man who teaches others to see. He talks about healing a wound, and does not stop irritating it. He complains of sickness, and does not stop eating what is harmful. He prays against it, and immediately goes and does it. And when he has done it, he is angry with himself; and the wretched man is not ashamed of his own words. I am doing wrong, he cries, and eagerly continues to do so. His mouth prays against his passion, and his body struggles for it. He philosophises about death, but he behaves as if he were immortal. He groans over the separation of soul and body, but drowses along as if he were eternal. He talks of temperance and self-control, but he lives for gluttony. He reads about the judgment and begins to smile. He reads about vainglory, and is vainglorious while actually reading. He repeats what he has learnt about vigil, and drops asleep on the spot. He praises prayer, but runs from it as from the plague. He blesses obedience, but he is the first to disobey. He praises detachment, but he is not ashamed to be spiteful and to fight for a rag. When angered he gets bitter, and he is angered again at his bitterness; and he does not feel that after one defeat he is suffering another. Having overeaten he repents, and a little later again gives way to it. He blesses silence, and praises it with a spate of words. He teaches meekness, and during the actual teaching frequently gets angry. Having woken from passion he sighs, and shaking his head, he again yields to passion. He condemns laughter, and lectures on mourning with a smile on his face. Before others he blames himself for being vainglorious, and in blaming himself is only angling for glory for
himself. He looks people in the face with passion, and talks about chastity. While frequenting the world, he praises the solitary life, without realizing that he shames himself. He extols almsgivers, and reviles beggars. All the time he is his own accuser, and he does not want to come to his senses I will not say cannot.
1.18 - THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
liver a lecture, and criticism would be out of place. What I have to
offer is simply the testimony of my own life, a testimony which I
1.19 - THE MASTER AND HIS INJURED ARM, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER (smiling): "Govinda Adhikari, it is said, would not keep good actors in his theatre lest they should claim a share of the profit. (All laugh.) "The other day I saw a disciple of Keshab. A theatrical performance was being given in Keshab's house, and I saw the disciple dancing on the stage with a child in his arms. I understand that this man delivers ' lectures'. He had better lecture to himself."
Trailokya sang:
1.200-1.224 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Mr. B. C. Das, a lecturer in Physics of Allahabad University, asked:
Does not intellect rise and fall with the man?
--
Mr. B. C. Das, the Physics lecturer, asked about free-will and destiny.
M.: Whose will is it? It is mine, you may say. You are beyond will and fate. Abide as that and you transcend them both. That is the meaning of conquering destiny by will. Fate can be conquered.
--
Mr. B. C. Das, the Physics lecturer, asked: Yoga means union. I wonder union of which with which.
M.: Exactly. Yoga implies prior division and it means later union of one with another. Who is to be united with whom? You are the seeker, seeking union with something. That something is apart from you. Your Self is intimate to you. You are aware of the Self. Seek it and be it. That will expand as the Infinite. Then there will be no question of yoga, etc. Whose is the separation
--
The lecturer in Physics asked if the same light and sound were cognisable by senses.
M.: No. They are super-sensual. It is like this:
--
Mr. B. C. Das, the Physics lecturer, asked: Contemplation is possible only with control of mind and control can be accomplished only by contemplation. Is it not a vicious circle?
M.: Yes, they are interdependent. They must go on side by side. Practice and dispassion bring about the result gradually. Dispassion is practised to check the mind from being projected outward; practice
1.20 - RULES FOR HOUSEHOLDERS AND MONKS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"At the sight of rich people Hazra would call them to him. He would give them long lectures. He would say to them: 'You see Rkhl and the other youngsters. They do not practise any spiritual discipline. They simply wander about merrily.'
"A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts; and practise austere discipline; but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on 'woman and gold', I say, 'Shame on him!' But I say that a man is blessed indeed who eats, drinks, and roams about, but who keeps his mind free from 'woman and gold'.
1.21 - A DAY AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Some worldly people may follow him. Keshab led the life of a householder; hence his mind was directed to the world also. He had to safeguard his family interests. That is why he left his affairs in such good order though he delivered so many religious lectures. What an aristocratic man he married his daughter to! Inside Keshab's inner apartments I saw many big bedsteads. All these things gradually come to one who leads a householder's life. The world is indeed a place for enjoyment."
RAM: "Keshab Sen inherited those bedsteads when his ancestral property was divided.
--
RAM: "Sir, let me tell you about the lectures of the New Dispensation. While the drum is being played, the members cry out, 'Victory unto Keshab!' You say that 'dal' grows only in a stagnant pool. So Amrita said one day in the course of his sermon: 'The holy man has no doubt said that 'dal' grows in a stagnant pool. But, brothers, we want 'dal', we want a sect. Really and truly, I tell you that we want a sect.' "
MASTER: "What nonsense! Shame on him! What kind of sermon is that?"
--
MASTER (to Ram): "Now tell me why my arm was hurt. Stand up and deliver a lecture on that. (Laughter.)
"The Brahmos insist that God is formless. Suppose they do. It is enough to call on Him with sincerity of heart. If the devotee is sincere, then God, who is the Inner Guide of all, will certainly reveal to the devotee His true nature.
1.22 - ADVICE TO AN ACTOR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"I said to Keshab: 'It is extremely difficult to realize God while leading a worldly life. How can a typhoid patient be cured if he is kept in a room where tamarind, pickle, and jars of water are kept? Therefore one should go into solitude now and then to practise spiritual discipline. When the trunk of a tree becomes thick and strong, an elephant can be tied to it; but a young sapling is eaten by cattle.' That is why Keshab would say in his lectures, 'Live in the world after being streng thened in spiritual life.'
(To the devotees) "You see, Keshab was a great scholar. He lectured in English. Many people honoured him. Queen Victoria herself talked to him. But when Keshab came here he would be bare-bodied and bring some fruit, as one should when visiting a holy man.
He was totally free from egotism.
1.22 - The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The main failure, the root of the whole failure indeed, is that he has not been able to shift upward what we have called the implicit will central to his life, the force and assured faith inherent in its main power of action. His central will of life is still situated in his vital and physical being, its drift is towards vital and physical enjoyment, enlightened indeed and checked to a certain extent in its impulses by the higher powers, but enlightened only and very partially, not transformed,checked, not dominated and uplifted to a higher plane. The higher life is still only a thing superimposed on the lower, a permanent intruder upon our normal existence. The intruder interferes constantly with the normal life, scolds, encourages, discourages, lectures, manipulates, readjusts, lifts up only to let fall, but has no power to transform, alchemise, re-create. Indeed it does not seem itself quite to know where all this effort and uneasy struggle is meant to lead us,sometimes it thinks, to a quite tolerable human life on earth, the norm of which it can never successfully fix, and sometimes it imagines our journey is to another world whither by a religious life or else an edifying death it will escape out of all this pother and trouble of mortal being. Therefore these two elements live together in a continual, a mutual perplexity, made perpetually uneasy, uncomfortable and ineffectual by each other, somewhat like an ill-assorted wife and husband, always at odds and yet half in love with or at least necessary to each other, unable to beat out a harmony, yet condemned to be joined in an unhappy leash until death separates them. All the uneasiness, dissatisfaction, disillusionment, weariness, melancholy, pessimism of the human mind comes from mans practical failure to solve the riddle and the difficulty of his double nature.
We have said that this failure is due to the fact that this higher power is only a mediator, and that thoroughly to transform the vital and physical life in its image is perhaps not possible, but at any rate not the intention of Nature in us. It may be urged perhaps that after all individuals have succeeded in effecting some figure of transformation, have led entirely ethical or artistic or intellectual lives, even shaped their life by some ideal of the true, the good and the beautiful, and whatever the individual has done, the race too may and should eventually succeed in doing; for the exceptional individual is the future type, the forerunner. But to how much did their success really amount? Either they impoverished the vital and physical life in them in order to give play to one element of their being, lived a one-sided and limited existence, or else they arrived at a compromise by which, while the higher life was given great prominence, the lower was still allowed to graze in its own field under the eye more or less strict or the curb more or less indulgent of the higher power or powers: in itself, in its own instincts and demands it remained unchanged. There was a dominance, but not a transformation.
1.23 - FESTIVAL AT SURENDRAS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
(To Pratap) "Let me tell you something. You are a learned and intelligent and serious-minded soul. Keshab and you were like the two brothers, Gaur and Nitai. You have had enough of lectures, arguments, quarrels,discussions, and dissensions. Can such things interest you any more? Now gather your whole mind and direct it to God. Plunge deep into God."
PRATAP: "Yes, sir, you are right. That is surely my only duty now. But I am doing all these things only to perpetuate Keshab's name."
--
The Master continued, addressing Pratap: "Did you listen to the song? You have had enough of lectures and quarrels. Now dive deep into the Ocean of God. There is no fear of death from plunging into this Ocean, for this is the Ocean of Immortality. Don't think that this will make you lose your head. Never for a moment harbour the idea that by thinking too much of God one becomes insane. Once I said to Narendra"
PRATAP: "Who is Narendra, sir?"
1.23 - Improvising a Temple, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Of course it is easy as pie to knock all this to pieces by "lunatic logic," saying: "Then toothache is really as pleasant as strawberry shortcake:" You are hereby referred to Eight lectures on Yoga. None of the terms I am using have been, or can be defined. All my propositions amount to no more than tautology: A. is A. You may even quote The Book of the Law itself: "Now a curse upon Because and his kin! . . . . Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!" (AL II, 28-33). These things stink of Ignoratio Elenchi, or something painfully like it: as sort of slipping up a cog, of "confusing the planes" of willfully misunderstanding the gist of an argument. (All magicians, by the way, ought to be grounded solidly in Formal Logic.)
Never forget, at the least, how simple it is to make a maniac's hell-broth of any proposition, however plain to common sense.
1.240 - 1.300 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Mr. G. V. Subbaramiah, a lecturer in English in Nellore, asked:
Brahman is the one by whom all this is pervaded (yena sarvamidam thatham). But then how does Sri Krishna specify the vibhutis in
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Mr. G. V. Subbaramiah, a lecturer in English in Nellore, asked:
Brahman is the one by whom all this is pervaded (yena sarvamidam thatham). But then how does Sri Krishna specify the vibhutis in
--
Bhagavans peace enfolding me for about ten days. All the time while busy in work there was an undercurrent of that peace of unity; it was almost like the dual consciousness while half asleep in a dull lecture.
Then it faded out entirely, and the old stupidities came in instead.
--
Self) during his lectures to students, he forgot where his body was and went on talking of Krishna. This rouses doubt whether work can safely be left to itself. Should one keep part-attention on the physical work?
M.: The Self is all. Now I ask you: Are you apart from the Self? Can the work go on apart from the Self? Or is the body apart from the Self? None of them could be apart from the Self. The Self is universal. So all the actions will go on whether you engage in them voluntarily or not. The work will go on automatically. Attending to the Self includes attending to the work.
1.24 - PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
At the sight of the pundit the Master again went into samdhi. After a while, still remaining in that state, he looked at the pundit and said with a smile, "Very well, very well." Then, addressing the pundit, the Master said, "Tell me how you give lectures."
PUNDIT: "Sir, I try to explain the teachings of the Hindu scriptures."
--
"You may deliver thousands of lectures, but they won't make the slightest impression on worldly people. Can one drive a nail into a stone wall? The point of the nail will sooner break than make a dent in the stone. What will you gain by striking the tough skin of the crocodile with a sword? The sdhu's water-bowl, made from the shell of a bitter gourd, may visit the four principal holy places of India with its owner, but it will still remain as bitter as ever. Your lectures are not helping worldly people very much; and you will realize this by and by. The calf cannot stand on its legs all at once. Now it drops to the ground and now it stands up. So it learns to stand finally on its legs and walk.
"You cannot distinguish a lover of God from a worldly person. It isn't your fault, of course. When the first onrush of the gale shakes the trees, it is impossible to distinguish one tree from another-the mango from the tamarind, for instance.
--
"When the lamp is lighted the moths come in swarms. They don't have to be invited. In the same way, the preacher who has a commission from God need not invite people to hear him. He doesn't have to announce the time of his lectures. He possesses such irresistible attraction that people come to him of their own accord. People of all classes, even kings and aristocrats, gather around him. They say to him: 'Revered sir, what can we offer you? Here are mangoes, sweets, money, shawls, and other things. What will you be pleased to accept?' In that case I say to them: 'Go away. I don't care, for these. I don't want anything.'
"Does the magnet say to the iron, 'Come near me?' That is not necessary. Because of the attraction of the magnet, the iron rushes to it.
--
MASTER: "What will a man accomplish by mere lectures without the commission from God? Once a Brahmo preacher said in the course of his sermon, 'Friends, how much I used to drink!' and so on. Hearing this the people began to whisper among themselves: 'What is this fool saying? He used to drink!' Now these words produced a very unfavourable effect. This shows that preaching cannot bring a good result unless it comes from a good man.
"A high government official from Barisal once said to me, 'Sir, if you begin the work of preaching, I too shall gird my loins.' I told him the story of people's dirtying the bank of the Haldrpukur and of its being stopped only when a constable, armed with authority from the government, put up a notice prohibiting it.
--
"Chaitanyadeva was an Incarnation of God. How little is left of what he accomplished-not to speak of a lecturer who preaches without authority from God! What good will a lecturer do?
Master exhorts the pundit to cultivate divine love "Therefore I say to you, dive deep in God-Consciousness."
1.25 - ADVICE TO PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER (to Shashadhar): "The first sign of knowledge is a peaceful nature, and the second is absence of egotism. You have both. There are other indications of a Jnni. He shows intense dispassion in the presence of a sdhu, is a lion when at work, for instance, when he lectures, and is full of wit before his wife. (All laugh.) "But the nature of the vijnni is quite different, as was the case with Chaitanyadeva. He acts like a child or a madman or an inert thing or a ghoul. While in the mood of a child, he sometimes shows childlike guilelessness, sometimes the frivolity of adolescence, and sometimes, while instructing others, the strength of a young man."
Three kinds of bhakti
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Bhagavan's peace enfolding me for about ten days. All the time while busy in work there was an undercurrent of that peace of unity; it was almost like the dual consciousness while half asleep in a dull lecture.
Then it faded out entirely, and the old stupidities came in instead.
--
Self) during his lectures to students, he forgot where his body was and went on talking of Krishna. This rouses doubt whether work can safely be left to itself. Should one keep part-attention on the physical work?
M.: The Self is all. Now I ask you: Are you apart from the Self? Can the work go on apart from the Self? Or is the body apart from the Self? None of them could be apart from the Self. The Self is universal. So all the actions will go on whether you engage in them voluntarily or not. The work will go on automatically. Attending to the Self includes attending to the work.
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Dr. Stanley Jones, a Christian missionary, visited Maharshi. He writes books and delivers lectures. He has two Asramams under his control in North India. He was accompanied by another gentleman and two ladies. He is at present writing a book On the Indian Road and wants to meet the spiritually great men in India so that he may collect material for the book. He desired to know how the Indian sages have proceeded and what they have found as their experience in divinity. So he asked questions. (This is only a short sketch of his interview).
D.: What is your quest? What is the goal? How far have you progressed?
1.450 - 1.500 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Dr. Stanley Jones, a Christian missionary, visited Maharshi. He writes books and delivers lectures. He has two Asramams under his control in North India. He was accompanied by another gentleman and two ladies. He is at present writing a book On the Indian Road and wants to meet the spiritually great men in India so that he may collect material for the book. He desired to know how the Indian sages have proceeded and what they have found as their experience in divinity. So he asked questions. (This is only a short sketch of his interview).
D.: What is your quest? What is the goal? How far have you progressed?
1.48 - Morals of AL - Hard to Accept, and Why nevertheless we Must Concur, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
What seems to me the most encouraging symptom of all is this: the Book itself, and the system of Magick based thereon, and the bankruptcy of all previous systems (as set forth in Eight lectures on Yoga, Magick, The Book of Thoth, and other similar works) do furnish us all with a clear, concise practical Method (free from all contamination of the humbug of faith and superstition) whereby any one of us may attain to "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," and that the many other Beings of intelligence and power indefinitely more exalted than anything which we recognize as human and, let us hope, capable of bestowing upon us a modicum of Wisdom adequate to get us out of the quagmire into which the crisis has temporarily plunged us all!
Love is the law, love under will.
1.50 - A.C. and the Masters; Why they Chose him, etc., #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I did indeed "finish" this, even announced publication; it was just going to Press when War (also announced five years before by Bartzabel, the Spirit of Mars) came along in 1914. I toted the rod around the world with me (excuse my American!) and in a fatal hour of weakness, self-mistrust, took to shewing it to some of my students. Of course I might have known they all with one accord began: "Oh, but you haven't said anything about " all the subjects in the world. So I started to fill in the gaps. As I did so, I found any amount more to do on my own. It went on like that for 14 years! Since it came out the voices of detraction have been dumb. I really do believe that I've covered the ground at last. Of course, time shewed that Part I, although it did really give the essentials of Yoga in the simplest possible language, was hardly more than an outline. More, it did not correlate Yoga with general philosophy. Eight lectures have, I believe, remedied this.
As to Part IV, The Book of the Law section, the idea was that the volume should comply with the instructions given in AL III,39: "All this and a book to say how thou didst come hither and a reproduction of this ink and paper for ever for in it is the word secret & not only in the English and thy comment upon this The Book of the Law shall be printed beautifully in red ink and black upon beautiful paper made by hand; and to each man and woman that thou meetest, were it but to dine or to drink at them, it is the Law to give. Then they shall chance to abide in this bliss or no; it is no odds. Do this quickly!" I mistook "Comment" for "Commentary" a word-by-word exposition of every verse (and much of it I loathed with all my heart!) including the Qabalistic interpretation, a task obviously endless.
1.70 - Morality 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
2. Eight lectures on Yoga gives a reasonable account of the essence of this matter, especially in the talks on Yama and Niyama. (A book on this subject might well include a few quotations, notably from paragraphs 8, 9 and 10 in the former). It might be summarized as "doing that, and only that, which facilitates the task in hand." A line of conduct becomes a custom when experience has shown that to follow it makes for success. "Don't press!" "Play with a straight bat!" "Don't draw to five!" do not involve abstract considerations of right and wrong. Orthodox Hinduism has raped this pure system, and begotten a bastard code which reeks of religion. A political manoeuvre of the Brahmin caste.
Suppose we relax a little, come down to earth, and look at what the far-famed morality of the Holy Man was, and is, in actual practice. You will find this useful to crush Toshophist and Antroposophagist[137] cockroaches as well as the ordinary Christian Scolex when they assail you.
1.81 - Method of Training, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
To study Yoga, you have my Book 4 Part I and my Eight lectures on Yoga. Then there is Vivekananda's Raja Yoga and several little-known Hindu writers; these latter are very practical and technical, but one really needs to be a Hindu to make much use of them. The former is very good indeed, if your remember to switch off when he slides into sloppiness, which luckily is not often.
To study Magick, Book 4, Parts II, III (Magick in Theory and Practice) and IV (The Equinox of the Gods.)[160] Add The Book of Thoth and there you are:
1.83 - Epistola Ultima, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
With Yoga the case is very different indeed. The literature on the subject is so enormous and contains so vast a number of more or less secret documents which circulate from hand to hand, that I believe that the best advice I can give anyone is to cut one's cloth very sparingly if one is to make a fitting suit. I do not think I am going too far if I say that Part I of Book 4 and my Eight lectures on Yoga form an absolutely sufficient guide to the useful practise of the subject; anything else is almost certain to operate as a distraction.
Swami Vivekananda summarised Yoga under four headings, and I do not think that one can improve on that classification. His four are: Gnana, Raja, Bhakti and Hatha, and comprise all divisions that it is desirable to make. As soon as one begins to add such sections as Mantra Yoga, you are adding to without enriching the classification, and once you begin where are you to stop? But I honestly believe that the excessive simplication given in Eight lectures on Yoga is a practical advantage. Any given type of Yogas is the work of a lifetime and for that reason alone it is desirable to confine oneself from the beginning to an absolutely simple programme.
What then is the difference between Yoga and Magick? Magick is extraversion, the discovery of and subsequently the classification of and finally the control of new worlds on new planes. So far as it concerns the development of the mind its object and method are perfectly simple. What is wanted is exaltation. The aim is to identify oneself with the highest essence of whatever world is under consideration.
--
Vol. III, 4 Eight lectures on Yoga the deepest book written on the subject of Yoga. Reprint by New Falcon available.
Vol. III, 5 The Book of Thoth a masterpiece on the Egyptian Tarot, with Appendices, and designs with an entirely new pack of Tarot cards, executed by Frieda Harris. Reprint by Samuel Weiser available.
1954-07-14 - The Divine and the Shakti - Personal effort - Speaking and thinking - Doubt - Self-giving, consecration and surrender - Mothers use of flowers - Ornaments and protection, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It comes from two causes: one, because it is a new faculty which naturally and instinctively has the attraction of new faculties; the other, because it helps you to become aware of your own thought. Otherwise one doesnt think, one is not able to formulate his thought unless he expresses it in words, aloud. Except those who are talkers by profession that is, those who are in the habit of giving lectures or political speeches, or taking classes, giving lessonsexcept these people who, obviously, can be both intellectual and talkative at the same time, as a general rule, the more talkative people are, the less are they intellectually developed!
What should be done to refrain from talking?
1955-06-01 - The aesthetic conscience - Beauty and form - The roots of our life - The sense of beauty - Educating the aesthetic sense, taste - Mental constructions based on a revelation - Changing the world and humanity, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He means that it is instinctive, that it isnt rational, it doesnt depend on the domain of reason, it is something instinctive. We have a sense of beauty and love beauty without even knowing why, and there are things which give the sense of beauty without our knowing why, without our reasoning. It is instinctive. He says that this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic sense. It is absolutely obvious that a child, who sees a pretty flower and has the feeling of beauty he does not know why, would never be able to tell you that its because the form is balanced and the colours are lovely; he cannot explain it. Therefore it is not rational, it is altogether instinctive, it is an attraction, an impulse drawing one towards something, a harmony one feels, without being able to define it. But most often it is like that. It is rarely that one is able to say, This thing is beautiful because of that, because of this, and to give a whole lecture on the beauty of something. Usually, one simply feels that it is beautiful; if later one wonders, Why did I feel it is beautiful? then, by making an effort with ones intelligence one may succeed in understanding it; but at the beginning one is not pre-occupied with the why, one feels that it is beautiful, and thats all, one is satisfied with that.
For example, you enter a historical building, and suddenly you are seized by the sense of a great beauty; how do you explain it? If someone asks you about it you would say, Well, I feel that it is beautiful. But if an architect enters a building and has the same feeling that it is beautiful, he will immediately tell you, Its because the lines meet harmoniously, the mass of the volumes is in harmony, the entire structure follows certain laws of beauty, order and rhythm, and he will explain them to you. But thats because he is an architect, and yet you could have felt the beauty as much as he without being able to explain it. Well, your feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls infrarational, and his feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls rational, because he can explain with his reason why he finds it beautiful.
1955-12-07 - Emotional impulse of self-giving - A young dancer in France - The heart has wings, not the head - Only joy can conquer the Adversary, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are others who understand first, who are very intellectual, have studied, can play with words and ideas, who will give you brilliant lectures on all the philosophies, all the religions, all human conceptions and who, perhaps, will take years to advance one step. Because all that goes on in the head.
Many things go on in the head. I have told you this already several times, the head is like a public square. Anything at all can enter there, come, cross over, go out, and create a lot of disorder. And people who are in the habit of playing with ideas are the ones most hampered from going farther. It is a game thats pretty, attractive; it gives you the impression that you are not altogether ordinary, at the level of ordinary life, but it cuts the wings.
1956-05-23 - Yoga and religion - Story of two clergymen on a boat - The Buddha and the Supramental - Hieroglyphs and phonetic alphabets - A vision of ancient Egypt - Memory for sounds, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But that is his theory. He told me also that he thought that it was Sri Aurobindo who had realised the teachings of the Buddha. Is that it? You didnt go to his lecture? No, then what did you want to ask?
Because it is nowtomorrow is the day the two thousand five hundred years will be overdoes this correspond to the new thing?
1957-09-11 - Vital chemistry, attraction and repulsion, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, the best thing is to look at all that from a little distance and to lecture yourself a little on the futility of these things.
Obviously there are some natures which are almost fundamentally bad, beings who are born wicked and love to do harm; and logically, if one is quite natural, not perverted, natural as animals are for from this point of view they are far superior to men; perversion begins with humanity then one keeps out of the way, as one would stand aside from something fundamentally harmful. But happily these cases are not very frequent; what one meets in life are usually very mixed natures where there is a kind of balance, so to say, between the good and the bad, and one may expect to have both good and bad relations. There is no reason to feel any deep dislike, for, as one is quite mixed oneself (laughing), like meets like!
1f.lovecraft - Old Bugs, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
and lecture platform, preparing volumes and speeches on various
subjects connected with belles lettres, and always shewing a genius so
--
his past mistakes. His impassioned lectures in defence of Villon, Poe,
Verlaine, and Oscar Wilde were applied to himself as well, and in the
1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
the lecture he agreed that his father was right, and that his noises,
mutterings, incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable
1f.lovecraft - The Shadow out of Time, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary
personalityeven though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then
with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled
1.fua - Looking for your own face, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral. You can never see your own face, only a reflection, not the face itself. So you sigh in front of mirrors and cloud the surface. It's better to keep your breath cold. Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean. One slight movement, the mirror-image goes. Don't be dead or asleep or awake. Don't be anything. What you most want, what you travel around wishing to find, lose yourself as lovers lose themselves, and you'll be that. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.fua - Mysticism, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi The sun can only be seen by the light of the sun. The more a man or woman knows, the greater the bewilderment, the closer to the sun the more dazzled, until a point is reached where one no longer is. A mystic knows without knowledge, without intuition or information, without contemplation or description or revelation. Mystics are not themselves. They do not exist in selves. They move as they are moved, talk as words come, see with sight that enters their eyes. I met a woman once and asked her where love had led her. "Fool, there's no destination to arrive at. Loved one and lover and love are infinite." [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.hs - Naked in the Bee-House, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi Being humble is right for you now. Don't thrash around showing your strength. You're naked in the bee-house! It doesn't matter how powerful your arms and legs are. To God, that is more of a lie than your weakness is. In his doorway your prestige and your physical energy are just dust on your face. Be helpless and completely poor. And don't try to meet his eye! That's like signing a paper that honors yourself. If you can take care of things, do so! But when you're living at home with God, you neither sew the world together with desires nor tear it apart with disappointments. In that place existence itself is illusion. All that is, is one. Lost in that, your personal form becomes a vast, empty mosque. When you hold on to yourself, you're a fire-worshipping temple. Dissolve, and let everything get done. When you don't, you're an untrained colt, full of erratic loving and biting. Loyal sometimes, then treacherous. Be more like the servant who owns nothing and is neither hungry nor satisfied, who has no hopes for anything, and no fear of anyone. An owl living near the king's palace is considered a bird of misfortune, ragged and ominous. But off in the woods, sitting alone, its feathers grow splendid and sleek like the Phoenix restored. Musk should not be kept near water or heat. The dampness and the dryness spoil its fragrance. But when the musk is at home in the musk bladder, fire and wetness mean nothing. In God's doorway your guilt and your virtue don't count. Whether you're Muslim, or Christian, or fire-worshipper, the categories disappear. You're seeking, and God is what is sought, the essence beyond any cause. External theological learning moves like a moon and fades when the sun of experience rises. We are here for a week, or less. We arrive and leave almost simultaneously. To be is not to be. The Qur'an says, "They go hastening, with the Light running on before them." Clear the way! Muhammed says, "How fine!" A sigh goes out, and there is union. Forget how you came to this gate, your history. Let that be as if it had not been. Do you think the day plans its course by what the rooster says? God does not depend on any of his creatures. Your existence or non-existence is insignificant. Many like you have come here before. When the fountain of light is pouring, there's no need to urge it on! That's like a handful of straw trying to help the sun. "This way! Please, let this light through!" The sun doesn't need an announcer. The lamp you carry is your self-reliance. The sun is something else! Half a sneeze might extinguish your lantern, whereas all a winter's windiness cannot put That out. The road you must take has no particular name. It's the one composed of your own sighing and giving up. What you've been doing is not devotion. Your hoping and worrying are like donkeys wandering loose, sometimes docile, or suddenly mean. Your face looks wise at times, and ashamed at others. There is another way, a pure blankness where those are one expression. Omar once saw a group of boys on the road challenging each other to wrestle. They were all claiming to be champions, but when Omar, the fierce and accomplished warrior, came near, they scattered. All but one, Abdullah Zubair. Omar asked, "Why didn't you run?" "Why should I? You are not a tyrant, and I am not guilty." When someone knows his own inner value, he doesn't care about being accepted or rejected by anyone else. The prince here is strong and just. Stand wondering in his presence. There is nothing but That. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.hs - Streaming, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi When the path ignites a soul, there's no remaining in place. The foot touches ground, but not for long. The way where love tells its secret stays always in motion, and there is no you there, and no reason. The rider urges his horse to gallop, and so doing, throws himself under the flying hooves. In love-unity there's no old or new. Everything is nothing. God alone is. For lovers the phenomena-veil is very transparent, and the delicate tracings on it cannot be explained with language. Clouds burn off as the sun rises, and the love-world floods with light. But cloud-water can be obscuring, as well as useful. There is an affection that covers the glory, rather than dissolving into it. It's a subtle difference, like the change in Persian from the word "friendship" to the word "work." That happens with just a dot above or below the third letter. There is a seeing of the beauty of union that doesn't actively work for the inner conversation. Your hand and feet must move, as a stream streams, working as its Self, to get to the ocean. Then there's no more mention of the search. Being famous, or being a disgrace, who's ahead or behind, these considerations are rocks and clogged places that slow you. Be as naked as a wheat grain out of its husk and sleek as Adam. Don't ask for anything other than the presence. Don't speak of a "you" apart from That. A full container cannot be more full. Be whole, and nothing. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.hs - The Good Darkness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi There is great joy in darkness. Deepen it. Blushing embarrassments in the half-light confuse, but a scorched, blackened, face can laugh like an Ethiopian, or a candled moth, coming closer to God. Brighter than any moon, Bilal, Muhammed's Black Friend, shadowed him on the night journey. Keep your deepest secret hidden in the dark beneath daylight's uncovering and night's spreading veil. Whatever's given you by those two is for your desires. They poison, eventually. Deeper down, where your face gets erased, where life-water runs silently, there's a prison with no food and drink, and no moral instruction, that opens on a garden where there's only God. No self, only the creation-word, BE. You, listening to me, roll up the carpet of time and space. Step beyond, into the one word. In blindness, receive what I say. Take "There is no good..." for your wealth and your strength. Let "There is nothing..." be a love-wisdom in your wine. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.hs - Then through that dim murkiness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi Then through that dim murkiness, I saw an old man with a radiant face. "You are the moon!" I called out. "Where did you come from?" "I am beyond substance and space. I am creation's cause, here to lead you back to your home. Hold close. and let my fire consume you. Don't be afraid of losing your strength here. This fire is one which has a spring of eternal water inside it. As your animal-soul dies, your new soul will be born. Live humbly with me, and I will raise you into majesty." He talked more to me in silence, without using syllables. He gave me love and light and eyes to see, and together we set out. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.hs - The Wild Rose of Praise, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Coleman Barks Original Language Persian/Farsi Those unable to grieve, or to speak of their love, or to be grateful, those who can't remember God as the source of everything, might be described as a vacant wind, or a cold anvil, or a group of frightened old people. Say the Name. Moisten your tongue with praise, and be the spring ground, waking. Let your mouth be given its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose's. As you fill with wisdom, and your heart with love, there's no more thirst. There's only unselfed patience waiting on the doorsill, a silence which doesn't listen to advice from people passing in the street. [1841.jpg] -- from The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, with lectures by Inayat Khan, Translated by Coleman Barks <
1.poe - Eureka - A Prose Poem, #Poe - Poems, #unset, #Zen
"Views of the Architecture of the Heavens." A letter, purporting to be from Dr. Nichol to a friend in America, went the rounds of our newspapers, about two years ago, I think, admitting "the necessity" to which I refer. In a subsequent lecture, however, Dr. N. appears in some manner to have gotten the better of the necessity, and does not quite renounce the theory, although he seems to wish that he could sneer at it as "a purely hypothetical one." What else was the Law of Gravity before the Maskelyne experiments? and who questioned the Law of Gravity, even then?
Many of my readers will no doubt be inclined to say that the result of these new investigations has at least a strong tendency to overthrow the hypothesis; while some of them, more thoughtful, will suggest that, although the theory is by no means disproved through the segregation of the particular "nebulae" alluded to, still a failure to segregate them, with such telescopes, might well have been understood as a triumphant Corroboration of the theory: -and this latter class will be surprised, perhaps, to hear me say that even with them I disagree. If the propositions of this Discourse have been comprehended, it will be seen that, in my view, a failure to segregate the "nebulae" would have tended to the refutation, rather than to the confirmation, of the Nebular Hypothesis.
1.rb - Paracelsus - Part III - Paracelsus, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
To lecture to as many thick-skulled youths
As please, each day, to throng the theatre,
--
But that my lectures serve indifferent well:
No doubt these dogmas fall not to the earth,
1.rb - Paracelsus - Part IV - Paracelsus Aspires, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
I fear, dear Ptter, that your lecture-room
Must wait awhile for its best ornament,
1.rb - Paracelsus - Part V - Paracelsus Attains, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
Speak from a couch? I never lectured thus.
My gownthe scarlet lined with fur; now put
1.rwe - Monadnoc, #Emerson - Poems, #Ralph Waldo Emerson, #Philosophy
And the learned lecture well.
Spare the clergy and libraries,
1.whitman - As A Strong Bird On Pinious Free, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
operas, lecturers, preachers;
Thee in thy ultimata, (the preparations only now completedthe
1.whitman - Eidolons, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Beyond thy lectures, learn'd professor,
Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope, observer keenbeyond all
1.whitman - I Sing The Body Electric, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
parlors and lecture-rooms?
This is not only one manthis is the father of those who shall be
1.whitman - Song of Myself, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvd voice.
--
Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.
1.whitman - Song Of Myself- V, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvd voice.
1.whitman - Song Of Myself- XL, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.
1.whitman - Song Of The Open Road, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the
spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents.
1.whitman - When I Heard the Learnd Astronomer, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
1.ww - 5 - I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, #Song of Myself, #unset, #Zen
Original Language English I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart, And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elder, mullein and pokeweed. [2333.jpg] -- from Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman <
1.ww - Book Fifth-Books, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
And can read lectures upon innocence;
A miracle of scientific lore,
1.ww - Book Third [Residence at Cambridge], #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Of College labours, of the lecturer's room
All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand,
2.01 - AT THE STAR THEATRE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Why should I sting people? I say to people: 'Do this as well as that. Do your worldly duties and call on God as well.' I don't ask them to renounce everything. (With a smile) One day Keshab was delivering a lecture. He said, 'O Lord, grant us that we may dive into the river of divine love and go straight to the Ocean of Satchidananda.' The ladies were seated behind the screen. I said to Keshab, 'How can you all dive once for all?' Pointing to the ladies, I said: 'Then what would happen to them? Every now and then you must return to dry land. You must dive and rise alternately.' Keshab and the others laughed.
"Hazra says to me, 'You love most those endowed with rajas, those who have great wealth and name and fame.' If that is so, then why do I love people like Harish and Loto? Why do I love Narendra? He can't even afford salt to season his roast banana!"
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: The Continental scientists have refused to build a philosophy of science. They say that it is not their business to explain, but to lay bare the process. Eddington in his Gifford lectures (1934) said that ultimately it is the human mind, the subjective element, which accepts one conclusion out of a number of possible conclusions. Scientific conclusion does not always depend upon objective reality but upon subjective interpretation. For example, 8 x 2 is equal to 16 and not 61 it is the mind that accepts this truth.
Sri Aurobindo: In this case it is the accumulated experience or, you may say, invariable experience, that gives the sense of certainty.
--
Disciple: Sir Arthur Eddington in his Gifford lectures (1934) says that science began with the aim of reducing the complexity of the material world to a great simplicity. But now, it seems, science has not been able to keep its promise and no model of the material universe is possible. A good deal of mathematics and specialisation is necessary now to understand what science says about the material world. Eddington says that the table on which he is writing is not merely a piece of wood. Scientifically speaking, it is a conglomeration of electrical particles, called electrons, moving at a very great velocity, and even though the particles are moving, his hands can rest on the surface and not go through.
He has also argued against the scientists who insist that the so-called objective view is the only view that is permissible or intended. The rainbow is not intended only to give man the knowledge or experience of the difference in the wave-lengths of light. The poet is equally entided to his experience when he says, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."
--
About Swami Hamsa I don't remember his name. It was in the Gaekwad's palace that he gave two or three lectures. I was invited. But it is not true that I went and saw him. At that time I was not interested in Yoga. I did not ask him about Pranayama. I learnt about Pranayama from the engineer Devdhar who was a disciple of Brahmananda.
I do not remember any yogic cure by Brahmananda; at any rate, I did not take any servant with me.
--
It is stated that Sri Aurobindo's patriotism got the religious colour by his contact with one Swami Hamsa. Swami Hamsa had nothing to do with his nationalism. He was a Hathayogi and Sri Aurobindo attended his lecture in the palace on invitation. He did not meet him at his place.
Mohanpuri did not give him daivi upsan introduction to spiritual life. It was for a purely political purpose that Sri Aurobindo took a Shakti Mantra from him. He performed a certain Yajna for the same purpose. But it was not Yoga.
2.01 - On the Concept of the Archetype, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[First published as a lecture, "Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus,"
in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1938. Later revised and published in Von den Wurzeln des
2.02 - On Letters, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
A disciple from Madras sent a copy of the Theosophist. It contained lectures and the latest declaration by Mrs. Besant about Krishnamurty's avatarhood and the descent of the world-teacher in him.
Disciple: Did you read the Theosophist?
--
K had written a letter to S containing an account of his Sadhana after receiving Sri Aurobindo's last letter and sent some questions to be answered by Sri Aurobindo to which no reply was sent for many days. Whenever Sri Aurobindo was reminded he said, "I am not inclined to lecture on the psychic being."
Today he inquired whether there were any important letters unanswered. He was told about K's letter.
Sri Aurobindo: Do you want me to lecture on the psychic being?
Disciple: Some general hints may be given, if you like.
--
This kind of thing is a great difficulty. There are some people here who, I believe, cant help propagandising. When R came here he was able to feel something here behind all the activities and he was progressing in his own way quite well. But one lecture from Y and the whole thing was upset.
Disciple: I suppose this sort of thing disturbs your work very much.
--
Disciple: He is giving lectures.
Sri Aurobindo: I thought he was already a kind of Guru. (Laughter)
2.02 - THE DURGA PUJA FESTIVAL, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Once Keshab Sen gave a lecture at his house. I was present. Many people were there.
The ladies were seated behind the screen. Keshab, in the course of his talk, said, 'O God, please bless us that we may dive and disappear altogether in the river of bhakti.' I said to Keshab with a smile: 'If you disappear altogether in the river of bhakti, then what will be the fate of those behind the screen? By all means dive into the river, but you had better come back to dry land now and then: Don't disappear in the river altogether.' At these words Keshab and the others burst out laughing.
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
like Max Muller presume to lecture us on our Veda & Vedanta
because they know something of Sanscrit grammar; but when
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Why! Anatomy and surgery were known to Indians. There were many surgical instruments in India. For an ancient system like the Ayurveda I doubt if the modern method of teaching would do. Modern methods make the whole subject too mental, too intellectual, while the ancient systems were more intuitional. These subjects used to be handed down from Guru to disciple. The same is true of Yoga. One can't think of schools and colleges and studies of Yoga. That would be an American idea. The centre of Yoga teaching in America has been holding classes and giving lectures and courses.
Disciple: Perhaps Hatha Yoga can be taught that way.
--
Disciple: But he was a very successful professor; I heard that people used to listen to his lectures with rapt attention.
Sri Aurobindo: He was very painstaking; most of the professors don't work hard. I saw that his books used to be interleaved and marked and full of notes.
--
Disciple: But people who heard you in College and those who heard you afterwards in politics differ from you. They speak very highly of your lectures.
Sri Aurobindo: I never used to look at the notes and sometimes my explanations did not agree with them at all. I was professor of English and for some time of French. What was surprising to me was that the students used to take down everything verbatim and mug it up by heart. Such a thing would never have happened in England.
--
Sri Aurobindo: It may be so in medicine, there is not much scope for original thinking. But in the arts it is not like that. You listen to the lectures, take notes if you like and then make what you can of them. There was always a demand for the students point of view.
The students at Baroda, besides taking my notes, used to get notes of other professors from Bombay, especially if any of them was an examiner. Once I was giving a lecture on Southey's Life of Nelson, and my lecture was not in agreement with the notes. So the students remarked that it was not at all like what was found in them. I replied that I had not read the notes; in any case they were all rubbish. I could never go into minute details. I read and left my mind to do what it could. That is why I could never become a scholar. Up to the age of fifteen I was known as a very promising scholar at St. Paul's. Thereafter I lost that reputation. The teachers used to say that I was lazy and was deteriorating.
Disciple: How was that?
2.05 - VISIT TO THE SINTHI BRAMO SAMAJ, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "It will be all right if you don't feel any egotism, if you don't have the vain feeling: 'I am giving a lecture. Listen to me.' What begets egotism? Knowledge or ignorance? It is only the humble man who attains Knowledge. In a low place rain-water collects. It runs down from a mound.
"A man achieves neither Knowledge nor liberation as long as he has egotism. He comes back again and again to the world. The calf bellows, 'Hamba! Hamba!', that is, 'I! I!' That is why it suffers such agony. The butcher slaughters it and the shoe-maker makes shoes from its hide. Besides, its hide is used for the drum, which is beaten mercilessly. Still no end to its misery! At long last a carding machine is made from its entrails. While carding the cotton the machine makes the sound 'Tuhu! Tuhu!', that is, 'Thou! Thou!' Then the poor calf is released from all suffering. It no longer says, 'Hamba! Hamba!' but repeats, 'Tuhu! Tuhu!' The calf says, as it were, 'O God, Thou art the Doer and I am nothing.
2.06 - On Beauty, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: Yes, he was seen once being stopped by the police on the road for a breach of traffic rule. He gave such an eloquent lecture in English that the policeman was flabbergasted.
Sri Aurobindo (laughing) : That must be him; he was my first friend in Baroda. He took me to his house and I stayed there for some time. He was a nice man; only, some would say 'volatile and mercurial'.
2.07 - On Congress and Politics, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: I met him in Bombay when we took the vow with Dr. Deshmukh to secure the independence of India. He was also one of those who took the oath and soon afterwards turned round. When I was going to Surat to attend the Congress I got down at Nagpur and had to give a lecture in the theatre there and I saw Moropant sitting there on one of the front benches gaping at me!
23 OCTOBER 1925
--
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. But it is not by lectures and sermonising to the village people, as we are trying to do now.
Disciple: I have letters from a friend informing me that the organisation of co-operative societies has succeeded in Gujarat.
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
In that very silence, in that thought-free condition, we went to Bombay. There I had to give a lecture at the National Union. So, I asked him what I should do. He asked me to pray. But I was absorbed in the Silent Brahman and so I told him I was not in a mood to pray. Then he said he and some others would pray and I should simply go to the meeting and make Namaskar to the audience as Narayana, the all-pervading Divine, and then a voice would speak through me. I did exactly as he told me. On my way to the meeting somebody gave me a newspaper to read. There was some headline there which caught my eye and left an impression. When I rose to address the meeting the idea flashed across my mind and then all of a sudden something spoke out. That was my second experience from Lele. It also shows that he had the power to give yogic experience to others.
When I was in Bombay, from the balcony of a friend's house, I saw the whole busy movements of Bombay city as a picture in a cinema show all unreal, shadowy. That was a Vedantic experience. Ever since I have maintained that peace of mind, never losing it even in the midst of difficulties. All the speeches that I delivered on my way to Calcutta from Bombay were of the same nature with some mixture of mental work in some parts. Before parting I told Lele: "Now that we shall not be together I should like you to give me instructions about Sadhana." In the meantime I told him of a Mantra that had arisen in my heart. He was giving me instructions when he suddenly stopped and asked me if I could rely absolutely on Him who had given me the Mantra. I said I could always do it. Then Lele said there was no need of instructions. We had then no talk till we reached our destination. Some months later, he came to Calcutta. He asked me if I meditated in the morning and in the evening. I said, "No." Then he thought that some devil had taken possession of me and he began to give me instructions. I did not insult him but I did not act upon his advice. I had received the command from within that a human Guru was not necessary for me. As to meditation, I was not prepared to tell him that I was meditating practically the whole day.
2.12 - On Miracles, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: In Ahmedabad the Sanitary Committee took the municipal staff and some volunteers and have cleaned up one of the biggest, narrowest and most thickly populated localities Mandwi. It took them more than three days. At the end lectures were given about the necessity and means of keeping the locality clean. The proposal is to clear the whole city gradually.
Disciple: When the Sanitary Committee has gone to one end of the city it may find that the other end it has left has become again as filthy as it was.
--
Sri Aurobindo: Work can be done in many ways. For instance, I can create a row in India through a communal organisation without giving lectures, or writing in the press. Once the Yogic power is there you can do many things. But the question is whether a particular activity is in keeping with the movement of the Truth. That is quite another maner. One has to see to it that one acts according to the Truth.
Then the question about building a greater India founded upon the Truth was put to Sri Aurobindo.
2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: Only, they do it without delivering lectures! (Laughter)
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, and without proclaiming aloud that they are the highest in the scale of creation because they do it. It is the same animal nature; what happens in man's case is that he raises it up to the mental level and there weaves all kinds of things around it thoughts, emotions, ideals, etc. and they justify to his mind the vital-animal nature.
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: That reminds me of the science of Augury in Greece. There used to be government augurs who used to be called in to interpret omens and signs; and from that a College of Augury came into existence. There, in the college, the professors used to be quite grave and serious they gave lectures on Augury with grave faces; but when afterwards they met together they used to laugh among themselves.
By the way, we have got mutilated radio news today. They have dropped two important words. Instead of saying the Italians are "planning to march" into Djibouti, they have said the Italians are "marching" into it. If the Italians march into Djibouti, the French can march into Tripoli as counter-attack.
2.17 - THE MASTER ON HIMSELF AND HIS EXPERIENCES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
(To Shashadhar) "God is now making you perform such duties as delivering lectures. You must do these things now. You will have peace when your duties are finished. After completing her household duties, the mistress of the family goes for her bath. She will not come back then even if you shout after her."
Thursday, August 27, 1885
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: On the other hand some Indian Sannyasis are making good business in America. One of them has modernised yoga; his method is a combination of business and yoga, "sets of lectures and courses on meditation" etc.
Sri Aurobindo: R was telling M that if M went to America he would be a great success. I think R was right. Some of these people have the character of a charlatan.
--
Sri Aurobindo: No, that was not the reason. It was by the intervention of the French Government, I think, that he got his release. He was a very ardent revolutionary in the beginning. Barin one day walked into his house, gave him a long lecture on revolution and converted him in one day.
Disciple: I heard that Nivedita also was a revolutionary, is it true?
2.19 - THE MASTER AND DR. SARKAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"One cannot teach men without the comm and of God. After attaining Knowledge, Sankaracharya retained the 'ego of Knowledge' in order to teach mankind. But to lecture without realizing God! What good will that do?
"I went to the Nandanbagan Brahmo Samaj. After the worship the preacher gave a lecture from the raised platform. He had written it at home. As he read from the manuscript he looked around. While meditating he opened his eyes from time to time to look at people.
Confusion of mere scholars
--
"Samadhyayi delivered a lecture. He said: 'God is beyond words and mind; He is dry.
Worship Him through the bliss of your love and devotion.' Just see, he thus described God, whose very nature is Joy and Bliss! What will such a lecture accomplish? Can it teach people anything? Such a lecturer is like the man who said, 'my uncle's cowshed is full of horses.' Horses in the cowshed! (All laugh.) From that you can understand that there were no horses at all."
DOCTOR (smiling): "Nor cows either!" (All laugh.) In the mean time the devotees who had been in a rapturous state had regained their normal mood. The doctor was highly pleased with them and asked M. about them. M.
--
M. (to the doctor): "Mahima Chakravarty used to come to your place to attend your lectures on medical science."
DOCTOR: "Is that so? How full of tamas he is! Didn't you notice it? I saluted him as 'God's Lower Third'. There exist in God sattva, rajas, and tamas. Tamas is the third and an inferior quality. Didn't you hear him say to the Paramahamsa, 'You yourself have created this disease in order to pamper the doctor's pride'?"
2.22 - THE MASTER AT COSSIPORE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "That is true. My teaching of others is coming to an end. I cannot give any more instruction. I see that everything is Rama Himself. And sometimes I say to myself, 'Whom shall I teach?' You see, because I am living in a rented house many kinds of devotees are coming here. I hope I shall not have to put up a 'signboard', like Shashadhar or Krishnaprasanna Sen,1 announcing my lectures." (The Master and M. laugh.)
M: "There is yet another purpose in this illness. It is the final sifting of disciples. The devotees have achieved in these few days what they could not have realized by five years' tapasya. Their love and devotion are growing by leaps and bounds."
2.25 - AFTER THE PASSING AWAY, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M: "Therefore Vidyasagar says: 'I cannot take care of my own self; should I be foolish enough to get an additional caning for misleading others? I myself do not understand God. How shall I lecture to others about Him?'"
NARENDRA: "How has he — who could not understand God — understood other things?"
2.3.1 - Ego and Its Forms, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An Indian philosopher was invited to Europe to deliver several lectures and was received well everywhere. When he returned to India, he found that the number of his critics had greatly increased. He wrote to ask Sri Aurobindo the reason.Ed.
***
2.4.1 - Human Relations and the Spiritual Life, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Human affection is obviously unreliable because it is so much bound up with selfishness and desire; it is a flame of the ego sometimes turbid and misty, sometimes more clear and brightly coloured sometimes tamasic based on instinct and habit, sometimes rajasic and fed by passion or the cry for vital interchange, sometimes more sattwic and trying to be or look to itself disinterested. But fundamentally it depends on a personal need or a return of some kind inward or outward and when the need is not satisfied or the return ceases or is not given, it most often diminishes or dies or exists only as a tepid or troubled remnant of habit from the past or else turns for satisfaction elsewhere. The more intense it is, the more it is apt to be troubled by tumults, clashes, quarrels, egoistic disturbances of all kinds, selfishness, exactions, lapses even to rage and hatred, ruptures. It is not that these affections cannot lasttamasic instinctive affections last because of habit in spite of everything dividing the persons, e.g. certain family affections; rajasic affections can last sometimes in spite of all disturbances and incompatibilities and furious ruptures because one has a vital need of the other and clings because of that or because both have that need and are constantly separating to return and returning to separate, or proceeding from quarrel to reconciliation and from reconciliation to quarrel; sattwic affections last very often from duty to the ideal or with some other support though they may lose their keenness or intensity or brightness. But the true reliability is there only when the psychic element in human affection becomes strong enough to colour or dominate the rest. For that reason friendship is or rather can oftenest be the most durable of the human affections because there there is less interference of the vital and even though a flame of the ego it can be a quiet and pure fire giving always its warmth and light. Nevertheless reliable friendship is almost always with a very few; to have a horde of loving, unselfishly faithful friends is a phenomenon so rare that it can be safely taken as an illusion. In any case human affection whatever its value has its place, because through it the psychic being gets the emotional experiences it needs until it is ready to prefer the true to the apparent, the perfect to the imperfect, the divine to the human. As the consciousness has to rise to a higher level, so the activities of the heart also have to rise to that higher level and change their basis and character. Yoga is the founding of all the life and consciousness in the Divine, so also love and affection must be rooted in the Divine and a spiritual and psychic oneness in the Divine must be their foundationto reach the Divine first leaving other things aside or to seek the Divine alone is the straight road towards that change. That means no attachmentit need not mean turning affection into disaffection or chill indifference. But X seems to want to take his vital emotions just as they aretels quelsinto the Divinelet him try and dont bother him with criticisms and lectures; if it cant be done, he will have to find it out himself. Or perhaps he wants to clap on the Divine to the rest as a crowning ornament, shikhara, of his pyramid of love and affections.
***
29.03 - In Her Company, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Buddhaghosha the thoughts simply come to you: when you have made this field of silence within, you will actually see thoughts arriving from outside into that field, your brain is occupied by intruders as it were, and you have the choice either to accept or to reject, entertain or throw them out. You can keep your mind absolutely blank as long as you like. Sri Aurobindo said, he practised this and in three days he made his mind absolutely blank, a zero, no thought, not even a ripple was there - it was a very remarkable experience at that time, quite new to him, such a peace and stillness, a perfect void! Then one day Sri Aurobindo met his teacher Lele Maharaj and told him that he was doing political work then and the next day he had to deliver a lecture, how was he to do it if he has to continue to be in a blank mind. If I speak, I have to think, I have to choose a subject. What am I to do? Lele Maharaj answered, "Do one thing, go to the meeting, stand in front of your listeners, do namaskar to the public and keep quiet, wait, see what happens. Don't try to say anything or think of anything simply remain as a passive instrument in the hands of the Supreme Power." Sri Aurobindo did as instructed he stood with folded arms, did namaskar to the public and, within, did pranam to the Supreme. He said: "I was thinking of nothing, awaiting things to happen as a silent witness. Then suddenly I found that something started in me and the tongue began to move, the tongue moved and moved and the lips began to utter words." He delivered in this way a long lecture, and he said he did not exactly know what was spoken through him, there was only a vague impression, but it was a great speech the others said. And from then on all his public speeches came in that way as automatic speeches. Later he explained to us, and showed to us, by example as it were, how the thing was done. It was at a sance; we used to sit together, a few of us, in his company. We sat, made ourselves comfortable, remained quiet and silent and then the thing happened: suddenly when everybody was quiet, still, he began to speak, I said he, but it was not his voice, it was surely somebody else speaking through him. The speaker sometimes announced himself saying he was such and such a person. Sometimes great historical persons also came, as for example, I have described in my Reminiscences, the famous leader of the great French Revolution, Danton. In a terrible voice he cried out: I am Danton, terror, red terror, etc. Once a great politician of the ancient days, of the Greek times, appeared and started to give lessons on politics. Bankim also appeared once, I have referred to this episode in my book.
So all this is to tell you that you are surrounded by a world of beings and influences and this visible body that you have, the normal mind active in you, are not all that you can call yours. Even in ordinary life when you think that you are acting, you are speaking, it is not at all true, or only partially true. A part, often a small part of you is involved in your activities. You are like an iceberg - the greater part is submerged, only the top, a very small portion of the whole is visible. This becomes apparent in abnormal occasions, when for example, you are upset off your feet, wild with anger, you utter words that you would never think of uttering, or act in a way absolutely contrary to your nature; all this is because at that time you are "possessed", truly possessed by invisible beings and entities. "Possession", possession by a ghost, is a familiar phenomenon. Hysteria also is a familiar case of possession. Hypnotism, mesmerism, various mediumistic practices are attempted ways and means to cultivate conscious and willed communion with the other world. But these are very crude operations and do not go deep or far enough; besides they may prove positively dangerous. Such phenomena are explained in many other ways but these are among things which are not dreamt of by the ordinary mentality. Indeed we live in the midst of a world fair. As I have said, all sorts of beings and influences and forces are there jostling within you and outside, and most of the time you are a mere puppet in their hands. It is not however all so miserable for you: as there are adverse beings and forces, so there are good angels and helpful deities available to you. It depends upon you to choose. And you have to choose rightly, that is how Yoga comes in as the saving factor in your life. We say Yoga is the way to be conscious of these invisible things and forces and to bring harmony and order out of the million contending forces in you. Instead of being driven, pushed and pulled in a thousand ways, Yoga shows how to direct them to a single aim, organise them round a single centre. Organise your life, that is the aim, the very central aim. That centre is the Divine in you, the Divine Presence, the Presence of the Mother, your true self, your soul. As I have said, there are very many forces and movements in you and without you that drag you in conflicting directions, you have to marshal them, direct them towards one goal, organise your being, your self, rather your selves, for you are not one self but many selves; you are not one person, but many persons. All of them have to be comprehended, coordinated, and finally that is the way to happiness - to true happiness. If happiness and contentment in life is life's purpose, then there is no other way than that of harmonising your personalities. Mother was always speaking of this necessity of rounding up, centering or integrating your personality, the only way of securing a fruitful, purposeful, fulfilled life. Indeed Yoga means literally joining together, joining all the discordant parts of your being, all the quarrelling personalities lodged in you in one single harmonious entity - your divine soul. It is difficult, the process: the path of yoga starts with purification, which involves strenuousness, as tapasya, but that is the basis. However, as I have said, you are not alone on the path, the help is there; apart from the helpful person and forces accompanying you there is the supreme unfailing help from the Mother. The Divine came to us in the material body to help us. She has withdrawn, taken away the body outwardly, but the help She has left with us is there almost in the same way as before.
3.01 - Forms of Rebirth, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
This paper represents the substance of a lecture which I delivered
on the spur of the moment at the Eranos meeting in 1939. In putting
--
of my lecture on the theme of rebirth, and have also endeavoured
to reproduce my analysis of the Eighteenth Sura of the Koran as an
--
be treated very superficially in the framework of a lecture c. g. j.
[First published as a lecture, "Die verschiedenen Aspekte der Wiedergeburt,"
in Eranos- J ahrbuch 1939 (Zurich, 1940). Revised and expanded as "Ober Wieder-
3.01 - The Mercurial Fountain, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
repetition, I would refer the reader to my lecture The Spirit Mercurius.
Here I will only say that this fluid substance, with all its paradoxical
33.01 - The Initiation of Swadeshi, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Calcutta was at the time in the throes of a great turmoil. The press and the platform were loud with cries of "Freedom" and "Boycott": the British must be driven out, India must be rid of the Britisher. In the parks and wherever there was an open space, crowds would gather to listen to lectures and orations, crowds mostly of boys from the schools and colleges - the girls had not yet come out and joined. Swadeshi, boycott, national education, rural uplift - these were the slogans dwelt upon everywhere. And with it all there went on, in secret, underground preparations for revolution and revolt and armed attack.
In our country, it has not been at all a rare thing for an individual to arrive at a turning point in his life which makes him leave the comforts of home and go out in search of something higher; such an event may be counted among the familiar and commonplace. But a whole nation rushing away from its old moorings in search of the unknown - this was a rather extraordinary spectacle. Something like it had been seen during the French Revolution, in the storming of the Bastille, for example, but the Indian awakening had a different form and character.
3.4.1.11 - Language-Study and Yoga, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What is the need for so many here to learn French? Are you preparing them for giving lectures or opening centres in France or French-knowing countries?
Are life and mind to be governed only by material utility or outward practicality? Spiritual life would then be inferior even to ordinary mental life where people learn for the sake of acquiring knowledge and culturing the mind and not only for the sake of some outward utility.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
18. I am supported in this belief by Dr. Baltzell's strong endorsement of my position during a heated discussion following a lecture I gave in Philadelphia in 1968.
19. Lippmann, Walter, The Public Philosophy-On the Decline and Revival of Western Democracy, Little, Brown, Boston, 1955.
--
Unknown to myself, I presently "repeated" (on a higher level) one of the main steps by which leading 17th century scientists transmuted their obsolete medieval universities into the new kind of institution called for by the emerging Lower Industrial Culture: For many years in the mid-1600s, a group of the new (Copernican, Baconian and Galilean) scientists met in London, in and about Gresham College. They usually met after the lecture of the Professor of Astronomy, either in his rooms or at a nearby inn. Some people called them, rather aptly, The Invisible College.37 In time, however, when the British Monarchy was restored and the new King needed to make a new departure, he conferred upon this group--in which the original Copernican change was most highly developed--a Royal Charter, transforming it into the Royal Society.38 And the Royal Society--along with its sister societies all over Europe and America--transformed the slowly yet centripetally evolving medieval university into the centrifugal modern multiversity, capable of making enormous disintegrative progress (Figures IV-9, 10).
"It was indeed a new departure," observes Arthur Koestler. "The range and power of the main sense organ of homo sapiens had suddenly started to grow in leaps to thirty times, a hundred times, a thousand times its natural capacity. Parallel leaps and bounds in the range of other organs were soon to transform the species into a race of giants in power--without enlarging its moral power by an inch. It was a monstrously one-sided mutation--as if moles were growing the size of whales, but retaining the instincts of moles. The makers of the (first) scientific revolution were individuals who in the transformation of the race played the part of the mutating genes. Such genes are ipso facto unbalanced and unstable. The personalities of these `mutants' already foreshadowed the discrepancy in the next development of man: the intellectual giants of the (first) scientific revolution were moral dwarfs." p. 352.20
--
The other major area in which Fosdick's religion and Unified Science reinforce each other he classes in his autobiography's index under Counseling, personal: "People come to church on Sunday with every kind of personal difficulty and problem flesh is heir to. A sermon (or, I presume to interject, a Unified Science lecture] was meant to meet such needs; it should be personal counseling on a group scale . . . . That was the place to start--with the real problems of the people. That was a sermon's speciality, which made it a sermon, not an essay or a lecture." Then Dr. Fosdick defines for his church services much the same objective which I had defined for each of my classes: "Every sermon should have for its main business the head-on constructive meeting of some problem which was puzzling minds, burdening consciences, distracting lives, and no sermon (or class) which so met a real human difficulty, with light to throw on it and help to win a victory over it, could possibly be futile." pp. 94.45
Now let us turn to concrete cases other than those at Brooklyn College back in the 'forties. Has Unified Science increased its capacity not just to instruct, but to inspire people to creative action?
--
A few weeks later I found myself at their United States headquarters in Washington, D.C., giving a lecture on The Intertranslatability of Unified Science and Unified Religion amid exclamations of "That's wonderful! That's absolutely perfect!"
I had, of course, to keep replying that it is most certainly not perfect, but that it may be perfectible.--That is a service which scientists must constantly and firmly render to men of religion, to keep our minds open to correction and to growth. What deadlier paralysis is there than the illusion of having reached perfection?
--
CASSIDY, Harold Gomes, born in Havana, Cuba, October 17, 1906; A.B. Oberlin College, 1930, A.M. 1932; Ph.D. (Chemistry) Yale, 1939. Member of Yale faculty, 1938-72, professor of chemistry, 1958-72. National Sigma Xi lecturer, 1960, 1965; Ayd lecturer, 1962; Korzybski Memorial lecturer, 1962; national lecturer, Scientific Research Society of America, 1965; senior fellow in science, Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1965-66; Danforth visiting lecturer, Association of American Colleges Arts Program, 1968, 1971 ; Sigma Xi centennial lecturer, Ohio State University, 1970. Recipient of third John Prymak service award, Connecticut Science Teachers Association, 1968; national award for excellence in chemistry teaching, Manufacturing Chemists Association, 1972. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, New York Academy of Sciences; secretary, Council for Unified Research and Education; member of New University Council. Author : (with J. English) Principles of Organic Chemistry, 1949; Absorption and Chromatography, 1951; (with J. English) Laboratory Book, 1951; Fundamentals of Chromatography, 1957; The Sciences and the Arts, 1962 ; (with K. A. Kun) Oxidation-Reduction Polymers, 1965; Knowledge, Experience and Action, 1969; Science Restated--Physics and Chemistry for the Non-Scientist, 1970; numerous articles. Associate editor, American Journal of Science, 1948-67. Address : Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana.
CLARK, Jere Walton, born in Rex, Georgia, January 31, 1922; B.B.A. University of Georgia, 1947, M.A. 1949; Du Pont fellow, University of Virginia, 1949-51, Ph.D. (economics) 1953. Assistant professor, West Virginia University, 1952-55; associate professor, University of Chattanooga, 1955-62; professor of economics, Southern Connecticut State College, 1962- , chairman of Department of economics, 1966-70, director of Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity, 1967- . Recipient of award for best college course in economics, Calvin K. Kazanjian Economics Foundation, 1963. Chairman, task force on general systems education, Society for General Systems Research; executive director, Consortium on Systems Education, New Haven. Address : Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity, Southern Connecticut State College, New Haven, Connecticut 06515.
HASKELL, Edward Frhlich, born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, August 24, 1906. A.B. Oberlin College, 1929; Columbia, 1929-30; Harvard, 1935-37; Chicago, 1937-40, fellow, 1940-43. Instructor in sociology (human, animal, plant) and anthropology, University of Denver, 1944, Brooklyn College, 1946-48. Chairman, Council for Unified Research and Education, 1948- . Consultant, West Virginia University, Drew University New School for Social Research, 1968; special lecturer, Southern Connecticut State College, Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity, 1969- . Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Applied Anthropology; convening secretary, New University Council. Author: Lance--A Novel About Multicultural Men, 1941; (with Harold Cassidy) Plain Truth and Redirection of the Cold War, offset printed, 1961; (with a chapter by Harold Cassidy) Unified Science, Volume I, offset printed by National Institute of Health and xeroxed by IBM Systems Research Institute, 1969; various articles. Address: 617 West 113th Street, New York, N.Y. 10025.
JENSEN, Arthur Robert, born in San Diego, California, August 24, 1923. B.A. University of California at Berkeley, 1945; M.A. San Diego State College, 1952; Ph.D. (psychology) Columbia, 1956. Research fellow, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, 1956-58; assistant professor of educational psychology, University of California at Berkeley, 1958-61, associate professor, 1962-66, professor, 1966- , associate resident psychologist, Center for Human Learning, 1961-66, resident psychologist, Institute for Human Learning, 1966- . Guggenheim fellow, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, 1964-65; fellow, Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, Stanford University, 1966-67. Author, Genetics and Education, 1972; numerous articles. Address: Department of Education, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720.
--
The second sighting variable, which is analogous to certain defects of the sighting mechanism, is the classifier's own mental-moral organization: his own grasp of the Periodic Law of Human Cultures. (In the history of chemistry, this mental variable produced the decisive difference between Newland's failure with his Octaves and Mendeleev's success with his Periodic Table, as described by Posin.--A famous example of this variation in anthropology is Ruth Benedict's own change of moral insight from 1934, when she copyrighted Patterns of Culture, to 1941 when she lectured on the same subject at Bryn Mawr College. In 1934 her sighting apparatus was cultural egalitarianism, which she and many others incorrectly labeled cultural relativism. It consists in flat contradiction of the Periodic Law. She stated this unequivocally in Patterns of Culture's concluding sentence, thus: "We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as a new basis for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence" (italics added). This flat denial of the Moral Law spread widely, and has intensified the breakdown symptoms in our culture which Toynbee called promiscuity, truancy, and drift. This is the Existentialists' disastrous way of dealing with the multiplicity of sighting mechanisms which constitutes each individual culture's and sub-culture's compass; namely, the false assertion that they are "equally valid" the abdication of responsibility of judging and assessing them relative to what Heisenberg calls a central order. (This subject is dealt with extensively in Chapter V.)
Frank Goble points out in The Third Force that by 1941, in her Bryn Mawr lectures, "Ruth Benedict was highly dissatisfied with the concept of cultural relativity, which was popular among anthropologists of her day, and with which her name has been closely associated. She struggled to develop a way of comparing various societies as unitary wholes or, in 20th-century terms, as "systems". She tried to correct her sighting error. Unfortunately, Benedict died in 1948. A part of her objective, however, was achieved by Ethel Albert a few years later, as shown above.
Benedict was nonetheless well on the way. Goble points out that "The terms that Ruth Benedict chose to describe the two types of society [which she had recognized as least equally valid] were `high synergy' and low `synergy.' The high synergy societies were those where people cooperated together for mutual advantage [Group IV societies, ( + , + )]." Her type specimens were the Zuni (Pueblo Indians), Arapesh, Dakota, and Eskimo.
5.4.01 - Notes on Root-Sounds, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
lecturer.
(2) , mixed.. set, inlaid.. variegated mixture
5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
i [First published as a lecture, "Zur Psychologie des Geistes," in the Eranos-Jahr-
buch 194$. Revised and published as "Zur Phanomenologie des Geistes im
6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
"thoroughly revised and enlarged version of the lecture of the same title first
published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1933," i.e., in 1934. The original version was
--
. "Psychology and Religion" (The Terry lectures). In: Psy-
chology and Religion: West and East, q.v.
--
Psychology and Religion (The Terry lectures) (1938/1940)
A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity (1942/1948)
--
Analytical Psychology and Education: Three lectures (1926/1946)
The Gifted Child (1943)
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
This he develops in his mirific lecture on the "Perigenesis of the Plastidule, or the wave-motions of
living particles." It is an improvement on Darwin's theory of "Pangenesis," and a further approach, a
--
henceforth the "Perigenesis of the Plastidule," and like lectures, should be bound up with those on
"Esoteric Buddhism," and "The Seven Principles in Man." Thus the public will have a chance, at any
--
years more, the 4,000 years may be further extended. The well-known Oxford lecturer remarked
during his disquisitions upon "The origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Babylonian
--
* From a Report of the "Hibbert lectures, 1887. lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, and
Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians." By A. H. Sayce. (London: Williams and
--
The following, quoted from a lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on
"The extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey" shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of
Atlantis, to accept the fact. It is a quotation in the body of the lecture: -"Evergreen Figs, Laurels, Palms, and Ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congeners in
a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in Devonshire in Miocene times, and
--
And yet what do we find: -"It is significant," says Sir W. Dawson, F.R.S., "that Professor Huxley in his lectures in
New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals, mainly on the supposed
--
them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures ('Nature,' 1876), admits that there is no
lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection
--
* Professor Max Muller's lectures -- "on the Philosophy of Mythology" -- are before us. We read his
citations of Herakleitos (460 B.C.), declaring that Homer deserved "to be ejected from public
--
Extract from a lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.
No. 1.
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
a wealthy Babylonian landowner, named Qu-tamy, who had used for those lectures still more ancient
materials. The first Arabic translation is placed by Chwolsohn so far back as the XIII. cent. B.C. On
--
of Nebo, the prophet god of Wisdom. We are told in the Hibbert lectures, "The ancient Babylonians
had an intercessor between men and the gods . . . and Nebo, was the 'proclaimer' or 'prophet,' as he
--
If one turns to those wells of information, "The Natural Genesis" and the lectures of Mr. Gerald
Massey, the proofs of the antiquity of the doctrine under analysis become positively overwhelming.
--
the Egyptians? -- "The earliest forces," proceeds the lecturer, "recognized in nature were reckoned as
seven in number. These became seven elementals, devils (?) or later, divinities. Seven properties were
--
Soul," does not invalidate our argument. The lecturer touches on only two keys, those that unlock the
astronomical and the physiological mysteries of esotericism, and leaves out the other five. Otherwise
--
Further on, the lecturer formulates these seven (Egyptian) souls, as (1) The Soul of Blood -- the
formative; (2) The Soul of Breath -- "that breathes"; (3) The Shade or Covering Soul -- "that
--
men into a number of elementary Spirits, as Mr. G. Massey, in the same lecture, accuses them of
maintaining. No "Esoteric Buddhist" has ever been guilty of any such absurdity. Nor has it been ever
--
pithecoid ancestor. What the lecturer takes for a "mode of expression" and nothing more, in the
Egyptian Ritual, we take as having quite another and an important meaning. Here is one instance.
--
** This is indeed news! It makes us fear that the lecturer had never read "Esoteric Buddhism" before
criticising it, as there are too many such misconceptions in his notices of it.
--
MEN." "I am the Soul of the Gods." Of these last two sentences, one: "whose soul comes from men" -is explained by the lecturer, who says parenthetically, "that is, as a type of intelligence," and the
other: "I am the Soul of the Gods," as meaning, "the Horus, or Christ, as the outcome of all."
--
The lecture referred to, however, much as it opposes "Esoteric Buddhism" and its teachings, is an
eloquent answer to those who have tried to represent the whole as a newfangled doctrine. And there
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
outside our terrestrial sphere, the great Teacher left entirely untouched in his public lectures, reserving
the hidden Truths for a select circle of his Arhats. The latter received their Initiation at the famous
--
Max Muller's lectures for example) the public may feel sufficiently sure (a) that the students of
ancient religions have indeed very few data upon which to build such final conclusions as they
--
plagiarized by the Brahmins from the Bible! But the facts cited by the Oxford Professor in his lectures
on the "Science of Religion," concerning the now famous interpolations, for the benefit, and later on to
--
* See Max Muller's "Introduction to the Science of Religion." lecture On False Analogies in
comparative Theology, pp. 288 and 296 et seq. This relates to the clever forgery (on leaves inserted in
--
woollen garment, her bosom was covered with golden stars, the feet being left naked." (From a lecture
by N. M. Prjevalsky.) To this, the famous traveller adds that all along their way on the river Tchertchen
--
Svetasvatara Upanishad, I. 8, and Devi Bhagavata Purana. The author of the Four lectures on the
Bhagavad Gita, says, in speaking of Mulaprakriti: "From its (the Logos') objective standpoint,
--
* See Mr. Subba Row's four able lectures on the Bhagavad Gita, "Theosophist," February, 1887.
** Called in Sanskrit: "Upadhi."
--
himself, the learned lecturer forthwith informs his audience that "We learn from Lalita-Vistara that
various forms of bodily torture, self-maceration, and austerity were common in Gautama's time." (!!)
But the lecturer seems quite unaware that this kind of torture and self-maceration is precisely the
lower form of Yoga, Hatha Yoga, which was "little known" and yet so "common" in Gautama's time.
--
* Mr. Subba Row seems to identify him with, and to call him, the LOGOS. (See his four lectures on
the "Bhagavadgita" in the Theosophist.)
--
of his lectures that Electricity is matter. Such, nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine.
"Force," "Energy," may be a better name for it, so long as European Science knows so little about its
--
portions, which behave like atoms of electricity." (Helmholtz, Faraday lecture, 1881). We will go
further than that, and assert that Electricity is not only Substance but that it is an emanation from an
--
** The "Theosophist" of February, 1887, p. 305, first lecture on the Bhagavadgita.
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 137 THE MYSTERY OF THE FEMALE LOGOS.
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* Says the lecturer on p. 306: "Evolution is commenced by the intellectual energy of the Logos, not
merely on account of the potentialities locked up in Mulaprakriti. This light of the Logos is the link . . .
--
effect that the manifested Kosmos is the Verbum manifested as Kosmos" (see lecture on the
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd1-1-07.htm (2 von 14) [06.05.2003 03:31:01]
--
given in the comment on Stanza V. As well said in the Bhagavadgita lectures, "The whole Kosmos
must necessarily exist in the One Source of energy from which this light (Fohat) emanates." Whether
--
* This is again corroborated by the same man of science in the same lecture, who quotes Clerk
Maxwell, saying "that the elements are not absolutely homogeneous." He writes: "It is difficult to
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
as much in agreement with the views of modern knowledge as a lecture by Sir W. Thomson, they
would have been rejected all the same. For they teach belief in conscious Powers and Spiritual
--
was the first in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, to show that
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 484 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
--
('Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens,' p. 5), having declared shortly before in the same lecture
that 'resolution of all changes in the material world into motions of atoms caused by their constant
--
And thereupon, toward the end of his lecture, Professor Lodge indicates that the explanation of
cohesion, as well as of gravity, "is to be looked for in the vortex-atom theory of Sir William
--
hypothesis). But Mr. Lodge might be reminded of the wise criticism on his lecture in the same
"Concepts of Modern Physics." Noticing the above-quoted declaration by the London Professor, the
--
10,000,000 years more" (Sir W. Thomson's lecture on "the latent dynamical theory regarding the
probable origin, total amount of heat, and duration of the Sun," 1887).
--
used by the astronomers in their lectures -- say for the moon -- then every one would see the Sun-spot
phenomenon repeated every second -- due to its contraction and the rushing of the blood.
--
hardly has the echo of his lecture on the "Genesis of the Elements" died away --the lecture which,
delivered by him before the Chemical Section of the British Association, at the last Birmingham
--
first lecture (quoted later) and deserve well the attention of every Occultist, Theosophist, and
Metaphysician. This is what he says in his "Elements and Meta-Elements," thus justifying Stallo's
--
intelligent Forces, was being described. But the learned lecturer adds something still more suggestive
to his descriptive remarks; whether consciously or unconsciously, who knoweth? For he says the
--
learned lecturer sees in it that which is his chief concern: the finger-posts and the traces of a path
which may lead to the discovery, and the full and complete demonstration of an homogeneous element
--
Now what says the learned President of the Chemical Society of Great Britain, in that same lecture,
which has any reference to, or bearing upon, our above-mentioned doctrine. Very little; only this -and nothing more: -"In the Birmingham address already referred to I asked my audience to picture the
--
Birmingham, 1886). This is what Helmholtz says (in his Faraday lectures, 1881): -"If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we
cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into
--
A few lines at the very close of his lecture on the Genesis of the Elements -- two or three sentences -showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road to the greatest discoveries. He has been
overshadowing for some time "the original protyle," and came to the conclusion that "he who grasps
--
With every respect due to the great knowledge of the lecturer, the Occultist would put it otherwise.
They would say that no atom is ever "created," for the atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One
--
** And the lecturer quotes Sir George Airy, who says (in Faraday's Life and Letters Vol. II., p. 354),
"I can easily conceive that there are plenty of bodies about us not subject to this intermutual action,
--
quoted from his lecture, "Elements and Meta-Elements."
"At the utmost," observes C. Wolf,* "could the nebular hypothesis show in its favour,
--
the Bhagavat Gita," by one of the best metaphysicians and Vedantic scholars in India,** the lecturer,
referring cautiously to "things occult" in that great Indian esoteric work, makes a remark as suggestive
--
examining the lecture delivered by Professor Crookes a short time ago upon the so-called elements of
modern chemistry. This lecture will give you some idea of the way in which these Elements spring
from Vishwanara,* the most objective of these three principles, which seems to stand in the place of
the protyle mentioned in that lecture. Except in a few particulars, this lecture seems to give the
outlines of the theory of physical evolution on the plane of Vishwanara, and is, so far as I know, the
--
These words will be re-echoed and approved by every Eastern Occultist. Much from the lectures by
Prof. Crookes has already been quoted in XII. of these Addenda. Since then, there has been another
--
attached to Mr. Crookes' lecture: "Genesis of the Elements," and ponder well over some passages of
the text. In one place (p. 11) he says: -". . . . Our notions of a chemical element have expanded. Hitherto the molecule has been regarded as
--
Brothers, from his Mother's (Aditi's) bosom, that bosom being prima MATER-ia -- the lecturer's
primordial protyle. Esoteric doctrines teach the existence of "an antecedent form of energy having
--
eminent lecturer, "to get a glimpse of some few of the secrets so darkly hidden" behind "the door of the
Unknown" -- a third should be added*** -- lest no battering at it should avail; the postulate that
--
And the lecturer proceeds to show that to Leibnitz atoms and elements are centres of force, or rather
"spiritual beings whose very nature is to act," for the elementary particles are not acting mechanically,
--
force. Leibnitz's monads, adds the lecturer, "differ from atoms in the following particulars, which are
very important for us to remember, otherwise we shall not be able to see the difference between
--
*** Brother C. H. A. Bjerregaard, in his lecture (already mentioned), warns his audience not to regard
the Sephiroth too much as individualities, but to avoid at the same time seeing in them abstractions.
--
Dr. B. W. Richardson's lectures on the "Nervous Ether," have been sufficiently quoted from. Thus,
opinions are divided.
--
back into the night of time at least 3,000 B.C., as the lecturer tried to demonstrate. The Zodiac of the
Hindus, he thought, was far anterior to the Zodiac of the Greeks, and differed from it in some
--
were their peoples" (Hibbert lectures, p. 372). The god Nergas (death) destroyed them. "How did he
destroy them?" "By bringing into equilibrium (or balance) those who did not yet exist" (Siphrah
--
the present state of the world. And in his last lecture, as shown elsewhere, Sir W. Thomson declares
(1887) that the Sun is not older than 15 millions of years! Meanwhile, basing his arguments as to the
BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
"Symbolism," and no one has better described it than Mr. G. Massey, in his lectures and in "The
Natural Genesis." The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in its growth and
--
his lecture on "Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern": -"The man in the moon (Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar twins)
is often charged with bad conduct. . . . In the lunar phenomena the moon was one as the
--
Museum -- declaring, in one of his learned lectures, that "neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of
their ideas from Egypt?"*
--
* Quoted in Mr. G. Massey's lecture.
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 403 IDENTITY OF TYPOLOGY.
--
Parabrahmam, the unknown and the incognisable, as the lecturer tells his audience:
". . . . . Is not Ego, it is not non-ego, nor is it consciousness . . . . . it is not even Atma" . .
--
bear this in mind," observes the lecturer, "for here is the root of the whole difficulty
about Purusha and Prakriti felt by the various writers on Vedantic philosophy. This
--
And the lecturer explains what he means by this acting of something which is nothing, though it is the
ALL, by a fine simile. He compares the Logos to the sun through which light and heat radiate, but
--
purely metaphysical aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his "Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita;"
the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human
BS 1 - Introduction to the Idea of God, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Thank you all very much for coming. Its really shocking to me that you dont have anything better to do on a Tuesday night. Seriously though, its very strange, in some sense, that so many of you are here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible stories. Its something Ive wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that theres a ready audience for it. Thats good. Well see how it goes.
Ill start with this, because its the right question: why bother doing this? And I dont mean why should I bother I have my own reasons for doing it but you might think, why bother with this strange old book at all? Thats a good question. Its a contradictory document thats been cobbled together over thousands of years. Its outlasted many, many kingdoms. Its really interesting that it turns out a book is more durable than stone. Its more durable than a castle. Its more durable than an empire. Its really interesting that something so evanescent can be so long-living. So theres that; thats kind of a mystery.
--
People get unbelievable upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. Theres a fundamental truth that theyre standing on. Its like theyre on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Youre starting to pull out the logs, and theyre afraid theyre going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. Ive been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. Ive done some lectures about that that are on YouTube. Most of you know that. Some of what Im going to talk about in this series youll have heard, if youve listened to the YouTube videos, but Im trying to hit it from different angles.
Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values. He understood that we had bodies, motivations, and emotions. He was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He knew that our capacity to think wasnt some free-floating soul, but was embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, and shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God, and to create their own values. He talked about the person who created their own values as the Overman, or the Superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology. We know what happened with that. That didnt seem to turn out very well. Thats for sure.
--
Part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary, aesthetic, and evolutionary perspective is to extract out something of value thats practical. One of the rules that I have when Im lecturing is that I dont want to tell anybody anything that they cant use. I think of knowledge as a tool. Its something to implement in the world. Were tool-using creatures, and our knowledge is tools. We need tools to work in the world. We need tools to regulate our emotions, to make things better, to put an end to suffering to the degree that we can, to live with ourselves properly, and to stand up properly. You need the tools to do that. So I dont want to do anything in this lecture series that isnt practical. I want you to come away having things put together in a way that you can immediately apply. Im not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Its gotta make sense, because the more restrictions on your theory, the better. I want it all laid out causally, so that B follows A and B precedes C. That way its understandable and doesn't require any unnecessary leap of faith.
Another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible is that youre called upon to believe things that no one can believe. Thats no good, because thats a form of lie, as far as I can tell. Then you have to scrap the whole thing, because, in principle, the whole thing is about truth. If you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lieshow in the world are you going to get anywhere with that? I dont want any uncertainty at the bottom of thisor I dont want any more than I have to leave in it, because I cant get any farther than that. Its going to make sense rationally. Even though science is in flux, I dont want it to be pushing up against what we know to be scientifically untrue. Thats something of a dangerous parameter. If it isnt working with evolutionary theory, for example, then I think that its not a good enough solution.
--
This is Genesis 1, and Im probably going to stop there because I believe its 9:30. We didnt even get to the first line. I want to read you a couple of things that well use as a prodromos for the next lecture. Ill just bounce through a collection of ideas thats associated with the notion of divinity. Well turn back to the first lines when we start the next lecture. I have no idea how far Im going to get through the Biblical stories, by the way, because Im trying to figure this out as I go along.
Theres an idea in Christianity of the image of God as a Trinity. Theres the element of the Father, theres the element of the Son, and theres the element of the Holy Spirit. Its something like the spirit of tradition, human beings as the living incarnation of that tradition, and the spirit in people that makes relationship with the spirit and individuals possible. Im going to bounce my way quickly through some of the classical, metaphorical attri butes of God, so that we kind of have a cloud of notions about what were talking about, when we return to Genesis 1 and talk about the God who spoke chaos into Being.
CASE 2 - HYAKUJOS FOX, #The Gateless Gate, #Mumonkan, #unset
Whenever Hyakujo delivered a Zen lecture, an old man was
always there with the monks listening to it; and when they left
Conversations with Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
I received a letter from my friend Y, whose wife is at Geneva. He sent me a lecture of his about internationalism and it will perhaps show you better what the man is.
(After reading it) It is more about nationalism than internationalism! He uses still crude language.
COSA - BOOK VI, #The Confessions of Saint Augustine, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
both when I first lectured in our town, and afterwards at Carthage, and
he loved me much, because I seemed to him kind, and learned; and I him,
--
greet me, come sometimes into my lecture room, hear a little, and be
gone.
Guru Granth Sahib first part, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The scholars speak and lecture.
Brahma speaks, Indra speaks.
MoM References, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Jaeger, W. (1968). The theology of the early Greek philosophers: The Gifford lectures 1936. London:
Oxford University Press.
r1914 04 11, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Dreams many & for the most part perfectly coherent; only the last two or three were affected by present personality & associations, but not by present images. The incidents & forms were real & coherent, & the incoherence existed only in the thought of the sakshi fixed by adhyaropa on the central images,rupa & karma were correct, nama only confused,eg the Salle de lecture of Pondicherry adhyaropita on a small but efficient & nobly built library, the Baroda College or a place of education in the same locality, London, brother, sister etc being brought in & fixed on forms & places entirely different. There was also a tendency to run different dreams into each other. In Samadhi thought has become fluent, coherent & self-possessed above the sushupta mind, lipi is clear & frequent, writing or print struggles to be coherently legible, forms & incidents are still in the stage of obstructed progress towards stability.
The difficulty now is to harmonise the chanda action of the Mahakali personality with the luminous effectiveness of the vijnana, as it has been harmonised with the internal purity, liberty & bhukti. For the luminous & effective vijnana has hitherto been the privilege of Maheswari-Mahasaraswati, & the Mahakali bhava has been always accompanied by false action, false tejas, false knowledge due to eagerness, hope, desire & preference. The old association has revived in the environmental nature owing to the liberation of the asiddha vayavic forces in the surroundings.
Ragnarok, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
main lecture hall. We all applauded, tearfully; these were the Gods returning
after a centuries-long exile. Made larger by the platform, their heads thrown
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
you, if indeed you care to have them. First see God, and then talk of lectures and social reforms.
8. A new-comer to a city should first secure a comfortable room for his rest at night, and after keeping
--
hand, all men rush to lecture and to teach with only a bit of book-learning. Strange indeed! To teach
others is the most difficult of tasks. He alone can teach, who gets a commission from God after having
--
173. First install God in the temple of your heart; first realize Him. Speeches, lectures and the rest may
be taken up after you have seen God, not before. People talk glibly of God and Brahman, while they are
--
enough of this world enough of lectures, controversies, schisms and the rest. Do you still care for them?
Now it is high time for you to collect your scattered mind and turn it towards God. Plunge into the ocean
Talks 001-025, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
M.: The realisation is the result of the Masters grace more than teachings, lectures, meditation, etc. They are only secondary aids, whereas the former is the primary and the essential cause.
Devotee: What are the obstacles which hinder realisation of the Self?
--
D.: Can such teachings be discussions, lectures and meditations?
M.: Yes, all these are only secondary aids, whereas the essential is the Masters grace.
--
D.: But common people in Europe and America would not appreciate such an attitude and would desire a display of powers and instructions by lectures, etc.
M.: lectures may entertain individuals for a few hours without improving them. Silence on the other hand is permanent and benefits the whole of humanity.
D.: But silence is not understood.
M.: It does not matter. By silence, eloquence is meant. Oral lectures are not so eloquent as silence. Silence is unceasing eloquence.
The Primal Master, Dakshinamurti, is the ideal. He taught his rishi disciples by silence.
Talks 051-075, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
There were reports of the above said Professors University lectures in the Hindu. The lecturer had emphasised the necessity for birth control and discussed the various possibilities of making the man feel his responsibilities so that birth control might be automatic. The Master, on hearing it, casually remarked. Let them find out the method of dying. [Here death refers to that of the ego (ahankar).]
24th July, 1935
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
used to hold classes and give lectures and readings in Yoga.
NIRODBARAN: Perhaps all this can be done with Hatha Yoga?
--
omens, and from that a college of augury came into existence. There the professors delivered lectures with grave and important faces but when afterwards they met together they would laugh among themselves.
By the way, we have got mutilated news on the radio today. They have
--
listen to his lectures with rapt attention.
SRI AUROBINDO: He was very painstaking. Most of the professors don't work
--
youspeak very highly of your lectures.
SRI AUROBINDO: I never used to look at the notes and sometimes my explanation didn't agree with them. I was professor of English and for some time of
--
Once I was giving a lecture on Southey's Life of Nelson. And my lecture
was not in agreement with the notes in the book. So the students remarked
--
to my father. On receiving it my father sent me just the amount of the college dues and a lecture on my extravagance. It pained me to a certain extent,
as we were living on such a meagre sum. Manmohan was extravagant, if
--
process. Eddington says in his Gifford lectures that the human mind, the
subject, ultimately accepts one conclusion out of a number of conclusions
--
not only himself an ardent revolutionary but also egging others on to revolution. Barin once walked into his house, gave him a long lecture on revolution and converted him in one day!
PURANI: Yes, Barin had intensity and fire at that time. Once I saw him at Baroda with my brother. They were discussing revolutionary plans. I saw that
--
breaking a traffic rule. He gave the police man a long lecture in English,
leaving the fellow flabbergasted.
--
CHAMPAKLAL: I hear he is holding classes in the town and giving lectures on
Yoga.
--
about the nature of this Yoga. Y hold of him one day and gave a long lecture.
R was extremely surprised and said, "What is all this now?'' And everything
--
NIRODBARAN: He is a professor or lecturer of climatology in Calcutta University.
SRI AUROBINDO: He has come to study the climate?
--
present got up and said, "The lecture was very interesting, but the lecturer is
my son and was born out of my early marriage. You see how tall and strong
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
PURANI: N.R. Sarkar has given a lecture in Madura against non-violence.
He says non-violence can't prevent invasion by another power.
--
MULSHANKAR: I heard your lecture at Bombay after the Surat Congress.
You had some paper in your hand.
--
In that state of mind I told Lele, "I have been asked to deliver a lecture.
How am I going to speak? Not a single thought is coming to me. I cannot
--
DR. MANILAL: Have you read Professor N.N. Sen's lecture at the Madras
Philosophy Conference?
--
After this Nirodbaran referred to Professor Amarnath Jha's lecture in the
Hindu on Indian English where he has mentioned Gandhi's prose style as
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
A dog came in during a lecture
A mispronounced word in rhetoric class
--
a celebrated lecture by Henri Poincare at the Societi de Psychologie in
Paris, and concern one of his best-known mathematical discoveries: the
--
the depths of the unconscious. Further on in that famous lecture from
which I have quoted (pp. 114-16) he tried to give an explanation of
--
Particularly fascinating in this lecture, delivered in 1908, is the fact
that Poincare, after acknowledging his debt to the 'subliminal self' and
--
memorial lecture in 1881, von Helmholtz himself one of the greatest
mathematical physicists of the century remarked:
--
while preparing a lecture on Brucke's work and thus became the
inventor of the ophthalmoscope.
--
techniques of enticing the audience in the lecture-room into an
imaginative, re-creative effort.
--
In the discussion which followed a lecture at an American univer-
sity on the subject of this book, one of the 'resident painters*
--
public lecture, is to set a hierarchy in motion.
*. . . And has the reader never asked himself*, 'WiDia.m James wrote
--
what is involved in preparing an ex-tempore lecture. The first step is
to jot down the principal arguments or themes in key-words in
--
the lecturer converts into verbal currency cognitive sub-wholes on
lower levels of the hierarchy, which have already been portioned out
--
thoughts' particularly, one may add, during a long and boring lecture;
while the reverse phenomenon is produced by the (Hsinhibiting action
--
he delivered his lectures and superintended the laboratory as usual.
The modernity of Maxwell's science, and the antiquity of his sociology
The Circular Ruins, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One afternoon (now afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was only awake for a couple hours at daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy, at times intractable, and whose sharp features resembled of those of his dreamer. The brusque elimination of his fellow students did not disconcert him for long; after a few private lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher. Nevertheless, a catastrophe took place. One day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him. He tried exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock he barely succeeded in experiencing several short snatchs of sleep, veined with fleeting, rudimentary visions that were useless. He tried to assemble the student body but scarcely had he articulated a few brief words of exhortation when it became deformed and was then erased. In his almost perpetual vigil, tears of anger burned his old eyes.
The Shadow Out Of Time, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example
of secondary personality - even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then
with some bizarre symptoms or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
--- Overview of noun lecture
The noun lecture has 3 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (8) lecture, public lecture, talk ::: (a speech that is open to the public; "he attended a lecture on telecommunications")
2. lecture, speech, talking to ::: (a lengthy rebuke; "a good lecture was my father's idea of discipline"; "the teacher gave him a talking to")
3. lecture, lecturing ::: (teaching by giving a discourse on some subject (typically to a class))
--- Overview of verb lecture
The verb lecture has 2 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (4) lecture, talk ::: (deliver a lecture or talk; "She will talk at Rutgers next week"; "Did you ever lecture at Harvard?")
2. (1) call on the carpet, take to task, rebuke, rag, trounce, reproof, lecture, reprimand, jaw, dress down, call down, scold, chide, berate, bawl out, remonstrate, chew out, chew up, have words, lambaste, lambast ::: (censure severely or angrily; "The mother scolded the child for entering a stranger's car"; "The deputy ragged the Prime Minister"; "The customer dressed down the waiter for bringing cold soup")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun lecture
3 senses of lecture
Sense 1
lecture, public lecture, talk
=> address, speech
=> speech act
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
lecture, speech, talking to
=> rebuke, reproof, reproval, reprehension, reprimand
=> criticism, unfavorable judgment
=> disapproval
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
lecture, lecturing
=> teaching, instruction, pedagogy
=> education
=> profession
=> occupation, business, job, line of work, line
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun lecture
2 of 3 senses of lecture
Sense 2
lecture, speech, talking to
=> sermon, preaching
=> curtain lecture
Sense 3
lecture, lecturing
=> talk
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun lecture
3 senses of lecture
Sense 1
lecture, public lecture, talk
=> address, speech
Sense 2
lecture, speech, talking to
=> rebuke, reproof, reproval, reprehension, reprimand
Sense 3
lecture, lecturing
=> teaching, instruction, pedagogy
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun lecture
3 senses of lecture
Sense 1
lecture, public lecture, talk
-> address, speech
=> allocution
=> colloquium
=> dithyramb
HAS INSTANCE=> Gettysburg Address
=> impromptu
=> inaugural address, inaugural
=> lecture, public lecture, talk
=> litany
=> oratory
=> public speaking, speechmaking, speaking, oral presentation
=> sermon, discourse, preaching
Sense 2
lecture, speech, talking to
-> rebuke, reproof, reproval, reprehension, reprimand
=> riot act
=> chiding, scolding, objurgation, tongue-lashing
=> what for
=> castigation, earful, bawling out, chewing out, upbraiding, going-over, dressing down
=> berating, blowing up
=> reproach
=> lecture, speech, talking to
=> correction, chastening, chastisement
=> admonition, admonishment, monition
Sense 3
lecture, lecturing
-> teaching, instruction, pedagogy
=> catechesis
=> catechetical instruction
=> language teaching
=> teaching reading
=> schooling
=> indoctrination
=> tutelage, tuition, tutorship
=> lesson
=> sleep-learning, hypnopedia
=> spoonfeeding
=> lecture, lecturing
--- Grep of noun lecture
curtain lecture
lecture
lecture demonstration
lecture room
lecturer
lectureship
public lecture
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Wikipedia - Leo Szilard Lectureship Award
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Wikipedia - Levi Romero (poet) -- American poet and lecturer
Wikipedia - Libby Heaney -- British artist, physicist and lecturer
Wikipedia - Liliane Ackermann -- Community leader, writer, lecturer
Wikipedia - List of public lecture series -- -- List of public lecture series --
Wikipedia - London Diving Chamber Dive Lectures -- A series of public lectures that have been hosted at the Royal Geographical Society in London
Wikipedia - Lon Milo DuQuette -- American writer, lecturer, musician, and occultist
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Wikipedia - Maggid Shiur -- Rabbi that lectures in a yeshiva or kollel
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Wikipedia - Maria Watkins -- Defence electronics engineer, lecturer and President of the WomenM-bM-^@M-^Ys Engineering Society.
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Wikipedia - Mary Hanford Ford -- American lecturer, author, art, literature critic and suffragette
Wikipedia - Mary Kate Ryan -- Irish academic the first woman lecturer
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Wikipedia - Mary Wood-Allen -- American doctor, social reformer, lecturer, and writer
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Wikipedia - Philip Beckley -- British physicist, author, and lecturer
Wikipedia - Philip Schwyzer -- American-British lecturer and author
Wikipedia - Pinkerton Lecture
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Wikipedia - Racah Lectures in Physics -- Annual memorial lecture in Physics
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Wikipedia - Reba Maybury -- Artist, writer, lecturer, feminist and political dominatrix
Wikipedia - Rhiannon Davies Jones -- Welsh author and lecturer
Wikipedia - Richard Martin (curator) -- American scholar, lecturer, critic, curator, art and fashion historian
Wikipedia - Rima Horton -- English former councillor and economics lecturer
Wikipedia - Robert Boyle Lecture
Wikipedia - Robert Farber (photographer) -- American photographer and lecturer
Wikipedia - Roisin Owens -- Irish biochemist and lecturer
Wikipedia - Romanes Lecture
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Wikipedia - Royal Institution Christmas Lectures -- Annual UK Christmas scientific lecture series aimed at children, started 1825
Wikipedia - Rudolf Steglich -- German musicologist and lecturer
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David Wilcock ::: Born: March 8, 1973; Occupation: Lecturer;
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee ::: Born: 1953; Occupation: Lecturer;
Marshall Ganz ::: Born: March 14, 1943; Occupation: Lecturer;
John Kehoe ::: Born: 1934; Occupation: Lecturer;
Charles Lenox Remond ::: Born: February 1, 1810; Died: December 22, 1873; Occupation: Lecturer;
Bruce Hoffman ::: Born: 1954; Occupation: Lecturer;
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The White Shadow (1978 - 1981) - When a professional athlete busts his knee, there are a few vocational routes to take. There's sports commentary, the autobiography business, personal appearances at used car lot grand openings, and the lecture circuitall careers that A.E. Housman may have been thinking of when he wrote his poem "T...
Let Me Die A Woman(1977) - A documentary on the work of sex-change specialist Dr. Leo Wollman, including interviews with Dr. Wollman and a few of his patients, with an illustrated lecture on the various aspects of transsexuality plus actual footage of a sex-change operation, which is what gives the film its notoriety.
I Was A Teenage Frankenstein(1957) - Professor Frankenstein, a university lecturer with an alligator pit under his house, steals body parts of dead athletes from the wreckage of a crashed airplane. He builds a hunky male monster with a hideously disfigured face, which goes on a killing spree.
Night Train to Lisbon (2013) ::: 6.8/10 -- R | 1h 51min | Mystery, Romance, Thriller | 6 December 2013 (USA) -- Swiss Professor Raimund Gregorius (Jeremy Irons) abandons his lectures and buttoned-down life to embark on a thrilling adventure that will take him on a journey to the very heart of himself. Director: Bille August Writers:
The Soft Skin (1964) ::: 7.5/10 -- La peau douce (original title) -- The Soft Skin Poster -- Pierre Lachenay is a well-known publisher and lecturer, married with Franca and father of Sabine, around 10. He meets an air hostess, Nicole. They start a love affair, which Pierre is hiding, but he cannot stand staying away from her. Director: Franois Truffaut
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Amatsuki -- -- Studio Deen -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Demons Fantasy Historical Shoujo Supernatural -- Amatsuki Amatsuki -- Tokidoki Rikugou is a history-hating student who flunks out of his Japanese History course; his high school forces him to make up for his failed grade by attending a special museum lecture. Its star exhibit, a vast recreation of the Edo Period, promises to alleviate the delinquent student's poor grades with an elaborate simulation of the Tokugawa Shogunate: the Edo Bakumatsu Walking Tour and Exhibition. -- -- Knowing next to nothing about samurai culture or the times he's walked into, he is quickly surprised to learn of the superstitious nature of Japan during the 1600s. Quickly dismissing the existence of gods and demons, he is shocked when confronted by a demon on a bridge, who attacks the unsuspecting high-schooler. Saved by a mysterious swordsman named Kuchiha, he discovers that he can no longer escape the simulation at the history museum. -- -- Meeting another swordsman named Kon Shinonome, he discovers another contemporary that was trapped in the simulation before him. Quickly adjusting to his new home, Tokidoki must now help protect the village from demons, while uncovering the mystery of both the simulation and the company that created it. -- -- 53,203 6.91
Little Witch Academia -- -- Trigger -- 1 ep -- Original -- Adventure Comedy Magic Fantasy School -- Little Witch Academia Little Witch Academia -- For young witches everywhere, the world-renowned witch Shiny Chariot reigns as the most revered and celebrated role model. But as the girls age, so do their opinions of her—now just the mention of Chariot would get a witch labeled a child. However, undeterred in her blind admiration for Chariot, ordinary girl Atsuko Kagari enrolls into Luna Nova Magical Academy, hoping to someday become just as mesmerizing as her idol. -- -- However, the witch academy isn't all the fun and games Atsuko thought it would be: boring lectures, strict teachers, and students who mock Chariot plague the campus. Coupled with her own ineptness in magic, she's seen as little more than a rebel student. But when a chance finally presents itself to prove herself to her peers and teachers, she takes it, and now it's up to her to stop a rampaging dragon before it flattens the entire academy. -- -- Movie - Mar 2, 2013 -- 269,741 7.84
Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins -- -- Wit Studio -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Sci-Fi Space -- Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins -- Andross, an ape exiled from the Lylat Planetary System by General Pepper seeks revenge by attacking the planet Corneria and its innocence, kidnapping Pepper in the process. Meanwhile, it's another usual day for Team Star Fox, a gang of space mercenaries: Lazing around, getting angry at video games, and being lectured by their mentors. But all of that changes once they receive a distress call from a familiar face. -- -- Meet Fox McCloud, son of the deceased James McCloud, as he and his top-notch crew—Slippy Toad, Falco Lombardi and Peppy Hare—fight back against Andross's robotic army in style, and attempt to save Corneria from the skies. -- ONA - Apr 20, 2016 -- 3,467 6.20
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