Browse the archive

Find a fact, story or quotation. Search by subject, name or a few words you remember.

Find a card

Use the filters to narrow your search.

Results

Browse the archive

Page 7

StillnessLiterature

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages.

This line is usually credited to Human, All Too Human (1878), the first book of short, pointed reflections, or aphorisms, by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but it appears neither there nor in his other published works. The book does hold two close ideas. Aphorism 378 says the best friend will probably get the best wife, since a good marriage rests on a talent for friendship. Aphorism 406 advises anyone about to marry to ask whether they will still enjoy talking with this person in old age.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe. If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

Friedrich Nietzsche, later a leading German philosopher, was the son of a Lutheran pastor. In 1864 he began studying theology at the University of Bonn, but after one semester he gave it up, to his mother's anger, and lost his Christian faith. On 11 June 1865, aged twenty, he explained the change to his devout sister Elisabeth; the words on the card follow his line “Here the ways of men part”. That autumn he moved to Leipzig to study classical philology, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Prospero, the overthrown Duke of Milan who now rules a remote island by magic, says this in Act 4 of The Tempest. He has staged a masque, a courtly show of music, dance and costumed spirits, for his daughter Miranda's engagement, then breaks it off when he remembers a plot against his life. The actors, he tells the startled couple, were spirits, and palaces, temples and “the great globe itself” will fade the same way. “Made on” is an older form of “made of”. The play dates from about 1610–11.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Lysander says this in the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a comedy Shakespeare wrote around 1595. Hermia, the woman he loves, has just been told that under Athenian law she must marry her father's choice, Demetrius, or face death or a life as a nun. Comforting her, Lysander says that in every tale he has read or heard, true love has met some obstacle: rank, age, family, war, death or illness. The two decide to run away into the woods, where fairies turn their troubles into comic confusion.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.

Helena says this alone at the end of the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She loves Demetrius, who has left her for her friend Hermia, and she knows all Athens thinks her just as beautiful. Her conclusion is that love judges not by what the eyes see but by what the mind imagines. Her next line explains an old image, “And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind”: the Roman god of love was often shown blindfolded. Later a magic flower proves her right, changing the lovers' hearts overnight.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Polonius, the elderly chief adviser to the king of Denmark, says this in Act 2 of Hamlet, written around 1600. He has come to tell the king and queen that he has found the cause of Prince Hamlet's strange behaviour, promises to be brief, then talks in circles until Queen Gertrude cuts in: “More matter, with less art.” The joke is that the court's most long-winded man is praising brevity. In Shakespeare's day “wit” meant intelligence rather than humour: a sharp mind says much in few words.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

Catherine Earnshaw says this to Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, in chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë's only novel. She has just accepted a proposal from Edgar Linton, a wealthy neighbour, but confesses that she loves Heathcliff, the orphan raised alongside her. Heathcliff, listening unseen, hears her say that marrying him would degrade her and slips away before this declaration. That misunderstanding drives the rest of the story. Brontë published the novel under the pen name Ellis Bell and died a year later, aged 30.

Emily BrontëRead card

StillnessLiterature

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

This is the opening line of Endymion, a poem of about 4,000 lines that John Keats published in 1818, at 22. It retells the Greek myth of Endymion, a shepherd loved by the moon goddess. The lines that follow explain the claim: the loveliness of a beautiful thing grows and never passes into nothingness. Keats had trained as a surgeon and apothecary, and a reviewer in Blackwood's Magazine mocked the poem and told him to go back to his shop. He died in Rome in 1821, aged 25.

John KeatsRead card

StillnessLiterature

Hope is the thing with feathers.

The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote this poem around 1861 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hope is a small bird perched in the soul, singing a tune without words that never stops. It sings sweetest in a storm, and the poem ends on its quietest point: in the coldest land and on the strangest sea, it never once asked her for a crumb. Dickinson published only about ten of her nearly 1,800 poems in her lifetime; this one appeared in 1891, five years after her death.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

The soul selects her own society.

Emily Dickinson wrote this poem around 1862, in her most productive years, after she had largely withdrawn from social life in Amherst, Massachusetts. The soul chooses its own company and then shuts the door, unmoved when chariots stop at its low gate or an emperor kneels on its mat. In the last stanza it picks one person from a whole nation and closes its attention like stone. The poem was first printed in 1890, four years after her death, under the editors' title “Exclusion”.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

I dwell in possibility.

Emily Dickinson wrote this poem around 1862, in her most productive years. “Possibility” here means poetry, which the poem calls a fairer house than prose. It then builds that house: more windows, better doors, rooms like cedars that no eye can see into, and the sky for an everlasting roof. The poet's work inside is to spread her narrow hands wide to gather Paradise. For a writer who seldom left her family home, it says that imagination has more room than the world. The poem was first published in 1929.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Lord Darlington says this in Act III of Lady Windermere's Fan, the first of Oscar Wilde's society comedies, which opened in London on 20 February 1892. Men gathered in his rooms at night are joking about women and virtue; when his friend Dumby says they are all good except one, Darlington answers with this line. Teased for being romantic, he admits he loves a woman who is not free. He means Lady Windermere, who is hiding in the same room. The Irish writer Wilde (1854–1900) was famous for such sayings.

Oscar WildeRead card

StillnessLiterature

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

This line comes near the end of The Bell Jar, the only novel by the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). Its heroine, Esther Greenwood, spends a summer at a New York magazine, then sinks into severe depression and months of hospital care, as Plath did after her summer at Mademoiselle in 1953. The bell jar is Esther's image for her illness: a glass dome that cuts her off from the world. She hears her heartbeat this way at a friend's funeral, shortly before doctors decide whether she can leave hospital.

Sylvia PlathRead card

StillnessLiterature

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

Looking for Alaska (2005) was the first novel by the American writer John Green. Miles, a teenager at an Alabama boarding school, falls for his classmate Alaska Young, who keeps returning to the last words the novelist Gabriel García Márquez gives Simón Bolívar: a despairing question about how to escape a labyrinth. For her, the labyrinth is suffering. After a sudden loss leaves Miles struggling with grief and guilt, his answer at the end is forgiveness. The book won the 2006 Printz Award for young adult fiction.

John GreenRead card

StillnessLiterature

I am half agony, half hope.

Captain Frederick Wentworth writes this in a letter to Anne Elliot in chapter 23 of Persuasion. Eight years earlier Anne, then 19, broke off their engagement because her family and her friend Lady Russell persuaded her that a naval officer without a fortune was an unwise match. Now rich, he meets her again, and neither speaks. In Bath he overhears her telling his friend Captain Harville that women love longest, even when hope is gone. Persuasion, Jane Austen's last completed novel, appeared months after her death in 1817.

Jane AustenRead card

StillnessLiterature

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.

Emma Woodhouse says this to herself in Volume II, chapter 13 of Jane Austen's Emma (1815). Clever, rich and self-assured, Emma spends much of the novel arranging other people's love lives. One plan has hurt her young friend Harriet Smith, whom she convinced that the vicar, Mr Elton, loved her. When Harriet answers a gentle request with tearful gratitude, Emma is moved, reflects that warmth and tenderness of heart outshine any cleverness, and admits she lacks it. Austen reportedly said no one but herself would much like this heroine.

Jane AustenRead card

StillnessLiterature

You will be forgotten either way. So live in such a way that, while you are here, you belong to yourself.

No author has been found for this line; it circulates online. Its first half echoes the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who reminded himself in his private notebook, the Meditations (AD 170s), that he would soon forget everything and everything would soon forget him. The second half recalls the Roman writer Seneca, whose first letter to his friend Lucilius opens “Vindica te tibi”, roughly “claim yourself for yourself”: stop letting others take your time. Both belong to the tradition later called memento mori, “remember that you will die”.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessLiterature

All my life I've been trying to find a place where I can belong, and all my life I've known that no such place exists.

This wording is widely shared under the name of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the French philosopher and novelist, but it has not been traced to any of his books, plays or interviews. The feeling is close to his work, though. In his first novel, Nausea (1938), the narrator Antoine Roquentin comes to feel that he, like everything around him, is superfluous: there for no reason and fitting nowhere. Sartre's existentialism starts from that point: since no nature is handed to us in advance, each person makes meaning through their own choices.

Often attributed to Jean-Paul SartreRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

All this struggle just for life to end on a random day.

No author is known for this line; it circulates online as a modern thought. The sting is in the word “random”: a life's effort is long, while its end keeps no appointment. Ancient philosophers argued that facing this plainly is useful rather than gloomy. In On the Shortness of Life, written around AD 49, the Roman philosopher Seneca says life is not short; we waste much of it, and used well it is long enough. The Latin reminder memento mori, “remember that you will die”, belongs to the same tradition.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes.

The line opens “I Burn For You”, a poem posted under the name Kamryn Tanner on Poetry.com, a site where anyone can publish verse; on social media it also travels under other, unreliable names. The poem speaks from inside a painful relationship, where the one who is hurt is also blamed. Psychologists call this victim blaming. In the 1960s the American psychologist Melvin Lerner linked it to the just-world belief: wanting the world to be fair, people often decide that those who suffer must have deserved it.

Kamryn TannerRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

This line is shared everywhere as a quote from Kurt Cobain (1967–1994), singer and songwriter of the American band Nirvana, whose 1991 album Nevermind brought grunge, a raw, loud style of rock, into the mainstream. It has not been found in his interviews, his lyrics or Journals, the notebooks published in 2002. The idea is much older: the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that wanting to be someone other than yourself is a form of despair.

Kurt Cobain (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

No one is afraid of heights, they're afraid of falling down.

This saying is widely credited to Kurt Cobain, the singer of Nirvana, but it has not been found in his interviews, lyrics or published notebooks, so it is best treated as anonymous. Most people feel a natural fear of falling in high places; only when it becomes extreme is it called acrophobia, which affects roughly 2 to 5 per cent of people. In 1960 Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk showed that most crawling babies would not cross a glass floor over an apparent drop, even when their mothers called.

Kurt Cobain (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.

No author is known for this saying; it is usually shared without a name. The idea runs through many traditions. Japanese has nana korobi ya oki, “fall seven times, get up eight”. The Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith put a close version in The Citizen of the World (1760–61), letters supposedly written by a Chinese traveller in England: our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall. Because of that invented narrator, the line is still often credited to Confucius.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law and not an accident.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the American writer later famous for Walden, wrote this on 11 March 1842 to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both men were grieving. In January Thoreau's older brother John had died in his arms of tetanus, an infection that locks the muscles, after a small cut. Weeks later Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever. Thoreau was living in the Emerson household at the time and was close to the boy. The letter goes on: “It is as common as life.”

Henry David Thoreau, letter to Emerson (1842)Read card

Browse by mode

Drive, Stillness and Wonder

Today's selectionOpen today's card