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DrivePhilosophy

A crooked tree lives its own life, but a straight tree is turned into wood.

No Chinese original of this wording has been traced; the idea comes from the Zhuangzi, a classic of Chinese philosophy from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. In one story a carpenter walks past a giant oak by a village shrine without a glance, because its timber is useless. That night the tree appears in his dream: being useless, it says, has kept it alive. Another chapter says it plainly: “The straight tree is felled first.” Turkish has a similar saying: people throw stones at the tree that bears fruit.

Chinese proverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it.

The line is shared widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, novel or letter containing it has been found. Born in Germany in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, he spent more than a decade as a filing clerk at the city's post office. In 1969 his publisher, John Martin, offered him financial support to write full time. Bukowski wrote that he could stay and go crazy, or leave and starve: “I have decided to starve.” Within a month he had finished his first novel, Post Office.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card

StillnessLiterature

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

The line circulates widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, story or letter containing it has been identified. Its logic is a paradox: the part of you that notices the loss is the part still intact. Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) wrote about people worn down by dull jobs, drink and poverty, and Time magazine called him a “laureate of American lowlife”. His gravestone reads “Don't Try”. In a 1963 letter he explained that a writer should not strain for Cadillacs, creation or immortality, but wait for the work to come.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Do not waste your life trying to solve the sky. No one came back with the answer. Sit, breathe, and taste this hour.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, not a translation of Omar Khayyam. Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur who led the team behind the Jalali calendar, the basis of Iran's calendar today. Four-line poems, rubáiyát, were credited to him after his death, and how many are really his is still debated. The verse echoes Edward FitzGerald's famous English version: of all who passed through “the door of Darkness”, “Not one returns to tell us of the Road”.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessReligion & Belief

The wise argue about heaven and hell. The cup in your hand asks a simpler question: are you awake to this moment?

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its contrast between learned debate and the cup in hand runs through Edward FitzGerald's English version. In one quatrain the young poet eagerly hears scholars and holy men argue, “but evermore / Came out by the same door where in I went”. In another he sends his soul to bring back news of the afterlife, and it answers: “I Myself am Heav'n and Hell.”

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

The clay cup was once a living hand, a laughing mouth, a lover's face. Hold it gently. Everything returns to earth.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its image is one of the best known in those poems: the potter's clay is the dust of people who once lived. In one Persian quatrain a jug was once a lover, and its handle an arm around a beloved's neck. Edward FitzGerald's English version of 1859 has a whole “Book of Pots”, and a lump of wet clay that murmurs to the potter: “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

Do not let tomorrow steal today. Even a promised paradise can become an excuse for missing the life in front of you.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Edward FitzGerald's English version of 1859 asks why we should fret about “Unborn TO-MORROW and dead YESTERDAY” if today is sweet. A later edition answers those who sigh for paradise: “Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go”, meaning the pleasure in hand, not a promise. FitzGerald even jokes that Khayyam, who helped reform the calendar, only struck tomorrow and yesterday out of it.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

If the universe is a riddle, you are not here only to suffer over the answer. You are also here to sing.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its closing word points to the best-known quatrain in Edward FitzGerald's English version: a book of verses under a bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and the beloved “Beside me singing in the Wilderness”. The first edition of 1859 hardly sold, and the publisher later boasted of letting copies go for a penny. By the 1890s more than two million had been sold.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

We are travellers between silence and silence. The miracle is not that life ends, but that it was given at all.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its picture of life as a short journey between two unknowns is close to a quatrain in Edward FitzGerald's English version: we come into the universe not knowing why or whence, “like Water willy-nilly flowing”, and leave it “as Wind along the Waste”. How much of this is Khayyam's own is uncertain. FitzGerald admitted that his translation was “very un-literal” and that many quatrains were “mashed together”.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

And just because you are a dream, I sleep a lot.

This line is shared widely online as Mahmoud Darwish's, but no poem or book containing it has been identified. Darwish (1941–2008) is regarded as the national poet of the Palestinians. Born in al-Birwa in Galilee, he was seven when his family fled to Lebanon in 1948; when they came back a year later, the village had been destroyed. The “Rita” of his love poems was a Jewish woman he loved when he lived in Haifa, and Marcel Khalife's song “Rita and the Rifle” carried the poem across the Arab world.

Mahmoud DarwishRead card

StillnessLiterature

We, who have the Souls, / Die oftener, not so vitally.

These lines close an eight-line poem that Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote around 1862 in Amherst, Massachusetts. It opens with nature scorching a sapling or stripping a tree; plants that survive remember, and their fainter leaves quietly bear witness. Then it turns to us. People with souls die more often, in griefs and disappointments, but “not so vitally”: we live on. The lines are often quoted without those last words. Only about ten of her nearly 1,800 poems were printed in her lifetime; this one first appeared in 1945.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.

The line circulates in Spanish and English under Pablo Neruda's name, but no poem, letter or interview containing it has been found. Pablo Neruda was the pen name of the Chilean poet Ricardo Neftalí Reyes (1904–1973), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. His Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) is still the best-selling book of poetry in Spanish. Later he wrote One Hundred Love Sonnets for Matilde Urrutia, the singer who had nursed him through an illness in Mexico and later became his wife.

Pablo NerudaRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, wrote these notes to himself in Greek, some in army camps on the Danube frontier; the title Meditations came later. The card follows Gregory Hays's 2002 translation. George Long's 1862 version keeps closer to the Greek: live the rest of your life “according to nature”, which for the Stoics meant living by reason and virtue. The exercise is a memento mori, Latin for “remember that you will die”: count your life as over, and what is left becomes a gift.

Marcus AureliusRead card

StillnessLiterature

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Jung never wrote this sentence; it is a popular paraphrase. The closest passage is in Aion (1951), where he states as a psychological rule that an inner situation not made conscious happens outside us, “as fate”. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. By the unconscious he meant the part of the mind we are not aware of: forgotten memories, feelings we push away. What we refuse to see in ourselves, he argued, returns as conflicts and events that seem to happen to us.

Carl Jung (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessMind

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

Jung wrote this on 22 October 1916 to Fanny Bowditch, whom the Boston doctor James Jackson Putnam had sent to him for treatment. The letter opens with the same idea: as long as she looks at other people and projects her own psychology onto them, she can never be in harmony with herself. He adds that he is leaving for military service and will start work with her in December. Popular versions shorten the passage and turn “vision” into “visions”. The letter is in C. G. Jung: Letters, volume 1.

Carl Jung, letter (1916)Read card

StillnessLiterature

A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognise truth. He ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love. He yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying, to others and to yourself.

Father Zosima says this in Book Two of The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), Dostoevsky's last novel. Zosima is a starets, an elder and spiritual guide in a Russian Orthodox monastery. The Karamazovs have come to his cell to settle a quarrel over an inheritance, and the father keeps playing the buffoon. Then he kneels and asks what he must do to gain eternal life. Zosima tells him to give up drink and loose talk, and above all not to lie to himself. The card shortens a modern translation of his answer.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.

In Notes from Underground (1864), the unnamed narrator, usually called the Underground Man, is a bitter retired civil servant in St Petersburg. He is arguing against an idea popular among Russian radicals, set out in Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863): people always act in their own rational interest, so a society built on reason would make everyone happy. People want freedom more than comfort, he replies, and some will even choose suffering to prove it: “twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

Raskolnikov says this in Part Three of Crime and Punishment (1866). A poor former law student in St Petersburg, he has murdered an old pawnbroker and is now visiting Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate, who has read his article claiming that “extraordinary” people may overstep the moral law for a great idea. When his friend Razumikhin asks whether such men should not at least suffer for the blood they shed, Raskolnikov replies that a man with a conscience will suffer, then adds this line “dreamily”.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.

Chaplin probably did say this, but the evidence is indirect. It first appeared in 1972, in the critic Richard Roud's programme notes for a New York gala honouring Chaplin, on his first visit to the United States in twenty years. A 1916 book published under his name already says that tragedy or comedy depends on how you look at it. In a close-up, one face and its pain fill the screen; in a long shot, the figure is small in a wide scene, and a fall can look funny.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

DrivePhilosophy

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

The thought belongs to Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794), a French writer famed for his wit in pre-revolutionary Paris. He wrote: “La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri”, the most wasted of all days is the one on which we have not laughed. He welcomed the Revolution, but his sharp tongue made enemies, and he died in 1794, during the Terror. The saying was published the following year. The Chaplin credit is recent: a character in the 1992 film Shining Through gives it to him.

After Nicolas Chamfort (1795); credited to Chaplin from 1992Read card

DrivePhilosophy

You'll never find rainbows if you're looking down.

The line comes from “Swing Little Girl”, a song Chaplin wrote for the 1969 re-release of The Circus, his 1928 silent comedy in which the Tramp becomes the unwitting star of a travelling circus. A hired singer recorded it first, without success, so the arranger Eric James suggested recording Chaplin too, just for his family. That version, sung by Chaplin at 79, is the one in the film. It plays over the opening credits as Merna Kennedy swings on a trapeze.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.

Calvero says this in Limelight (1952), which Chaplin wrote, directed, scored and starred in. Calvero, once a famous music-hall clown and now a forgotten drinker in the London of 1914, has saved a young ballet dancer, Terry (Claire Bloom), after she tried to end her life. She believes she can no longer walk and asks what there is to fight for. Everything, he answers: life itself. Chaplin drew on his own early years on the London stage, and Buster Keaton plays his partner.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Calvero, the fading clown Chaplin plays in Limelight (1952), says this as he tries to talk Terry, the dancer he has saved, out of her despair. He goes on: desire is the theme of all life, what makes a rose want to be a rose. Sailing to London for the premiere in 1952, Chaplin learned he would not be allowed back into the United States over his alleged communist sympathies. Limelight opened in Los Angeles only in 1972, and in 1973 its music won Chaplin his only competitive Oscar.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

This is aphorism 153 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886). It belongs to Part Four, a set of short sayings modelled on French writers such as La Rochefoucauld. In German: “Was aus Liebe gethan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse.” The first English translator, Helen Zimmern, knew Nietzsche personally. Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that good and evil are not fixed opposites. The aphorism does not say that love excuses everything, only that an act of love does not come from weighing rules, so moral bookkeeping cannot fully judge it.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

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