Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 6

Editor’s note

Stillness

For moments when you want to slow down, reflect or pay attention.

StillnessLiterature

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, says this to the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, near the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), the fourth of J. K. Rowling's seven Harry Potter novels. Harry has just seen the dark wizard Voldemort return, but Fudge refuses to believe it. Dumbledore accuses him of caring too much about so-called pure blood, meaning descent only from wizarding families. In the second book he tells Harry that our choices say more about us than our abilities.

J. K. RowlingRead card

StillnessLiterature

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Satan says this in Book One of Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton's epic poem retelling the Bible's story of the fall of Adam and Eve. Cast out of Heaven after his failed rebellion, Satan wakes in Hell and insists that neither place nor time can change his mind; a few lines later he declares it better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Milton (1608–1674), blind since 1652, dictated the poem to helpers. Readers argue whether the speech shows inner freedom or a pride that refuses to admit defeat.

John MiltonRead card

StillnessLiterature

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

William Blake (1757–1827), a London poet and engraver, printed and hand-coloured his own illustrated books. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, he imagines a visit to Hell, which stands for energy and desire rather than punishment, and brings back the “Proverbs of Hell”, provocative sayings like this one. The idea is that people learn their limits by living fully, not by timid obedience. Another proverb says you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

William BlakeRead card

StillnessLiterature

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), author of Mrs Dalloway, first made this argument in two talks at Cambridge's women's colleges, Newnham and Girton, in October 1928, and published it as A Room of One's Own in 1929. Her point was practical: writing needs time, privacy and money, and she even named a figure, £500 a year and a lock on the door. To show what women had been denied, she imagined Judith, Shakespeare's equally gifted sister, kept from school and laughed at when she tried to act.

Virginia WoolfRead card

StillnessLiterature

How can I blame the wind for the mess it made, if it was me who opened the window?

This line circulates widely under the name of Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), but no poem, book or interview of his has been found to contain it. Darwish is regarded as Palestine's national poet. His village, al-Birwa in Galilee, was captured and razed during the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, and in 1988 he wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Whoever wrote it, the line is about owning our part in our troubles. An old Turkish proverb says the same: “Kendi düşen ağlamaz”, those who fall through their own fault should not complain.

Mahmoud Darwish (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

The line is genuinely Bukowski's. It comes from The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, a selection from the journal Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) kept in his last years, published after his death, in 1998, with drawings by the cartoonist Robert Crumb. The German-born American poet and novelist wrote in plain, rough language about drink, dead-end jobs and Los Angeles. The passage goes on to say that this alone should make us love one another, yet small things wear us down instead.

Charles Bukowski (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

The American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) wrote this in her journal in February 1956, as a 23-year-old Fulbright student at Newnham College, Cambridge. Lonely in her first English winter, she was drafting a letter to Richard Sassoon, the young man she loved. Her father, Otto, had died when she was eight. A few days later, on 25 February, she met the poet Ted Hughes, whom she married that June. Her complete journals were published in 2000.

Sylvia PlathRead card

StillnessLiterature

All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.

These lines close the first of the poem's two stanzas. In the first, the speaker says goodbye to someone with a kiss and grants that those who think his days have been a dream are not wrong. In the second, he stands on a stormy shore as grains of sand slip through his fingers, and the poem ends by asking the same thing again as a question. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), the American poet of 'The Raven', published it in March 1849, about six months before his death.

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream" (1849)Read card

StillnessLiterature

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

The line comes from 'Economy', the first and longest chapter of Walden (1854), in which Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) looks at his neighbours in Concord, Massachusetts, working all their lives to pay for farms, houses and tools. The cost of a thing, he argues, is the amount of life you exchange for it. Right after this line he adds that what is called resignation is really settled desperation. By way of contrast, he lists what the materials for his own cabin by Walden Pond cost: $28.12½.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)Read card

StillnessLiterature

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

This is the opening of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a novel of London and Paris during the French Revolution by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), the most popular English novelist of his day. The sentence runs on through a chain of opposites, such as the spring of hope and the winter of despair, and ends by saying that the period was much like Dickens's own, when the noisiest voices also called their age either the best or the worst. It first appeared in his weekly magazine, All the Year Round.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)Read card

StillnessLiterature

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet says this in the balcony scene (Act 2, Scene 2), believing she is alone while Romeo listens in the garden below. She has just learned that the young man she loves is a Montague, from the family feuding with her own Capulets, and she argues that his name is not the person. Shakespeare wrote the play in the mid-1590s. Its first printing, in 1597, has 'name'; the 1599 edition reads 'by any other word'. By the end of the play the feud has cost both lovers their lives.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and JulietRead card

DriveLiterature

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.

'If—' is written as a father's advice to his son: a long chain of conditions that ends, 'you'll be a Man, my son!' Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the author of The Jungle Book, published it in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies and said it was inspired by Leander Starr Jameson, leader of a failed raid in southern Africa in 1895–96. These two lines are written on the wall of the players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, and in a BBC poll in the 1990s the poem was voted Britain's favourite.

Rudyard Kipling, "If—" (1910)Read card

StillnessLiterature

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

This is the first sentence of Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the Russian author of War and Peace, published the novel in instalments from 1875 to 1877, mostly in the magazine The Russian Messenger, and as a book in 1878. The next line opens on the Oblonsky household, in turmoil after the husband's affair. The sentence also gave its name to the 'Anna Karenina principle', popularised by Jared Diamond: success needs many things to go right at once, while failure can come from any one of them going wrong.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)Read card

StillnessLiterature

In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he is wiser in one small way than a man who thinks he knows things he does not: he does not think he knows what he does not know. The familiar 'I know that I know nothing' is a later paraphrase, not his words.

The Apology is Plato's version of the speech Socrates gave at his trial in Athens in 399 BC, accused of not honouring the city's gods and of corrupting the young; the jury sentenced him to death. He explains that his friend Chaerephon had asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the oracle said no. Puzzled, Socrates questioned politicians, poets and craftsmen, and found that each believed he knew far more than he did. Socrates himself wrote nothing; Plato was his student.

Socrates in Plato, Apology (paraphrased)Read card

DriveLiterature

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

These are the last two lines of 'Invictus'. William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), an English poet and editor, lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis as a young man. From 1873 he was treated at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh by the surgeon Joseph Lister, who saved his other leg, and he wrote the poem there in 1875. It was published without a title in 1888; the Latin title, meaning 'unconquered', was added by an anthology editor in 1900. Nelson Mandela recited it to fellow prisoners on Robben Island.

W.E. Henley, "Invictus" (1875)Read card

StillnessLiterature

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

These are the opening lines of the Divine Comedy, the long poem Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote in Italian from about 1308, much of it in exile after he was banished from Florence in 1302. The story is set at Easter 1300, when Dante was 35: half of the seventy years the Bible gives as a lifespan, hence 'the middle of the journey'. Lost in the dark wood, he is met by the Roman poet Virgil, who guides him down through Hell. The journey continues through Purgatory to Paradise.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I (c. 1320)Read card

DriveLiterature

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), the Philadelphia printer, scientist and statesman, published Poor Richard's Almanack every year from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name Richard Saunders. Among its calendars and weather forecasts were short sayings, many of them older proverbs he sharpened. In the 1734 edition this one is a rhyming couplet: 'Take this remark from Richard poor and lame, / Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.' In 1753 he added that anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1734)Read card

DriveLiterature

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

No one has found this line in Franklin's writings. It was being printed as his by 1909, more than a century after his death, usually after another unverified line about a man who 'empties his purse into his head'. In 1989 the Library of Congress's dictionary of quotations, Respectfully Quoted, listed it as unverified. It suits him, though: Franklin left school at ten, taught himself by reading, and in 1731 helped found the Library Company of Philadelphia so that its members could share books.

Benjamin Franklin (attributed, 18th century)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Einstein said this to the American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, whose interview 'What Life Means to Einstein' appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929. By then he was world famous: measurements made during the 1919 solar eclipse had confirmed his general theory of relativity, and he had won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. The line follows his remark that he was 'enough of an artist' to draw freely on his imagination. A similar passage appeared in his book Cosmic Religion in 1931.

Albert Einstein, The Saturday Evening Post interview (1929)Read card

StillnessLiterature

I am large, I contain multitudes.

The line answers a question Whitman asks himself near the end of 'Song of Myself': does he contradict himself? Very well, he says, he does, because he is large enough to hold many selves. Walt Whitman (1819–1892) paid to publish the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself in 1855, twelve untitled poems in about 800 copies, and kept revising it for the rest of his life. In 2020 Bob Dylan used 'I Contain Multitudes' as the title of a song.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass (1855)Read card

StillnessLiterature

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

These are the opening words of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813 without its author's name. The sentence sounds like a grand general truth, but it is a joke. As the story shows, it is the neighbouring families with daughters, above all Mrs Bennet with her five, who are sure that a rich young newcomer, Mr Bingley, must want a wife. Jane Austen (1775–1817), author of six novels, wrote with a light touch about a serious matter: in her world, a woman's security depended on marrying well.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Kipling said this at the annual dinner of the Royal College of Surgeons in London in February 1923, in a speech later printed as ‘Surgeons and the Soul’. Speaking to doctors, he took the idea of a drug seriously: words, he went on, can infect, poison, numb and paralyse, and even colour the tiniest cells of the brain. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), born in Bombay, wrote The Jungle Book, Kim and the poem ‘If—’, and in 1907 became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Rudyard Kipling, address to the Royal College of Surgeons (1923)Read card

StillnessLiterature

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Algernon says this in Act 1 of The Importance of Being Earnest, first staged in London on 14 February 1895. His friend Jack has just explained why he is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, calling it ‘the whole truth pure and simple’. Algernon takes that stock phrase, which means ‘and nothing else’, at its word and turns it round: if truth were either, he adds, modern life would be very tedious and modern literature impossible. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer famous for his wit.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)Read card

StillnessLiterature

I can resist everything except temptation.

Lord Darlington says this in Act 1 of Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first comedy of London high society, staged in February 1892. He has just called Lady Windermere ‘a fascinating Puritan’ for her strict moral rules, and when she objects to the adjective, he says he couldn't help it. The joke lies in the surprise: temptation is exactly what willpower is meant to resist. She replies that he has ‘the modern affectation of weakness’. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer famous for his wit.

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)Read card

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