Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 7

Editor’s note

Stillness

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

StillnessLiterature

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Lord Darlington says this in Act 3 of Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), as a group of men talk in his rooms. Cecil Graham asks what a cynic is, gets this answer, and fires back that a sentimentalist sees an absurd value in everything but doesn't know the market price of any single thing. The Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) also gave the thought to Lord Henry in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: people nowadays, he says, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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

StillnessLiterature

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Peter says this in J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan (1904) and again in the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy. Wounded by Captain Hook, Peter is stranded on a rock in the Mermaids' Lagoon as the tide rises. He sends Wendy to safety on a kite that can carry only one. He is afraid for a moment, then stands up smiling, these words beating inside him like a drum. Barrie (1860–1937), a Scottish writer, later gave the rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London.

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)Read card

StillnessLiterature

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet says this in Act 1, Scene 5, at Elsinore castle. His father's ghost has just told him he was murdered by his own brother Claudius, now king and married to Hamlet's mother. As Hamlet makes his friends swear to keep silent, the ghost's voice calls ‘Swear’ from under the ground. Horatio, his friend and fellow student at Wittenberg, calls it all ‘wondrous strange’. ‘Your philosophy’ means book learning in general: the world holds more than scholars can explain. Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote Hamlet around 1600.

William Shakespeare, HamletRead card

StillnessLiterature

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

This line comes from the first part, or epistle, of An Essay on Man, a long philosophical poem that Pope published anonymously in 1733–34. The next line explains it: ‘Man never Is, but always To be blest’. Pope's point: we are rarely content with the present, but we never stop expecting happiness to come, and that hope keeps us going. Alexander Pope (1688–1744), barred from university as a Catholic, became famous for his satires and his translations of Homer.

Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man" (1734)Read card

StillnessLiterature

The proper study of mankind is man.

This line opens the second part, or epistle, of Pope's An Essay on Man (1733–34). The full couplet reads: ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Pope's advice: rather than prying into God's plans, which lie beyond us, study human nature. ‘Know thyself’ echoes the words inscribed at Apollo's temple at Delphi. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) also gave English ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’ and ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’.

Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man" (1734)Read card

DriveLiterature

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

This maxim opens Chapter 12 of Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Each chapter begins with a saying from ‘Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar’, the joke almanac kept by David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom his Missouri town dismisses as a fool, or ‘pudd'nhead’. The entry goes on to say that calling a creature brave only makes sense if it is partly a coward: otherwise the flea, which attacks people asleep or awake whatever their size, would be the bravest animal alive. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910).

Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Still waters run deep.

The Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, writing about Alexander the Great in the 1st century AD, recorded ‘the deepest rivers flow with the least sound’ as a proverb from Bactria, in Central Asia. Today the saying usually means that a quiet person may have deep feelings or a sharp mind. It was once a warning too: a calm surface can hide danger. The French still say there is no worse water than sleeping water, and a Turkish saying warns that a meek, downcast look can hide mischief.

English proverb; Latin origin: Altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labunturRead card

StillnessHistory

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

The earliest known version is by the English clergyman Thomas Fuller, in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), a book on the Holy Land: ‘it is always darkest just before the day dawneth’. His example was David, whose own men were ready to stone him shortly before he was proclaimed king. The worst trouble, Fuller meant, often comes just before relief. As astronomy it is not quite right: the night is darkest around its middle, and the sky begins to pale an hour or more before sunrise.

English proverb, recorded by Thomas Fuller (1650)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” It is a popular modern saying often attributed to Confucius, but no reliable passage in the Confucian classics has been identified as its source.

Confucius (551–479 BC) was a teacher and official in the state of Lu, in eastern China. He wrote no book; his followers collected his sayings in the Analects. This line has not been traced to the Analects or any other early text, and seems to be a modern saying that borrowed a famous name. A genuine Analects line has a similar spirit: those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and those who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

Anonymous modern saying; commonly misattributed to ConfuciusRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.

The line is in Book 7 of the Analects, the recorded sayings of Confucius (551–479 BC), here in the 1861 translation by the Scottish scholar James Legge. ‘Superior man’ renders junzi, literally a ruler's son, a word for a nobleman; Confucius used it for anyone noble in character. The ‘mean man’ is the xiaoren, the ‘small person’. Elsewhere Confucius says the superior man's mind is set on what is right, the mean man's on gain: so one has nothing to fear, while the other always fears loss.

Confucius, The AnalectsRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

Though often credited to the Buddha, the saying appears in no Buddhist scripture. It looks like a modern reworking of a line by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island. In ‘El Dorado’, an essay collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881), he wrote that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour’: we are happiest while we still have something to strive for. The Buddha, by contrast, taught a path with a clear goal: freedom from suffering.

Buddhist proverb, attributed to the BuddhaRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Empty vessels make the most noise.

The image comes from everyday life: tap an empty pot or barrel and it rings loudly, while a full one gives only a dull thud. Applied to people, it means that those who know least often talk most. It was already an old saying around 1599, when a boy in Shakespeare's Henry V, watching the boastful soldier Pistol, remarks that the empty vessel makes the greatest sound. Turkish has ‘Boş başak dik durur’: an empty ear of wheat stands upright, while a full one bows its head.

English proverb (16th century)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

A problem shared is a problem halved.

The idea is old. The Roman statesman Cicero wrote that friendship makes hard times lighter by dividing and sharing them, and in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (1625) Francis Bacon said that it doubles joys and cuts griefs in half. German has a twin, ‘geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid’: shared sorrow is half sorrow. Turkish says that whoever keeps their trouble to themselves will find no cure for it. In a 2008 study led by the psychologist Simone Schnall, people judged a hill less steep when a friend stood beside them.

English proverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass said this in August 1857 at Canandaigua, New York, at a celebration of the end of slavery in Britain's Caribbean colonies; in the American South, slavery was still legal. He goes on: those who want freedom without protest want crops without ploughing and rain without thunder, and power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle, he said, may be moral or physical, but it must be a struggle. Douglass (c. 1818–1895) was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1838 and became a leading voice against slavery.

Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation" speech (1857)Read card

StillnessHistory

‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ is often credited to Thomas Jefferson, but it has never been found in his writings. The saying goes back to the Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran, who said in a 1790 speech in Dublin that liberty is given to people on condition of eternal vigilance.

Curran spoke in 1790 in a dispute over the right to elect the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He warned that the idle usually see their rights taken by the active, and that God gives liberty on condition of eternal vigilance: break that condition, and servitude follows as both result and punishment. The short modern form was used by the American anti-slavery campaigner Wendell Phillips in a speech in Boston on 28 January 1852. In 1879 Phillips himself wrote that the line had been credited to Jefferson but that no one had found it in his works, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs his home at Monticello, lists it as spurious. Curran (1750–1817) was an Irish barrister and member of the Irish Parliament, famous for defending people accused of rebellion against the Crown.

Widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson and John Philpot Curran; popularised in 19th centuryRead card

StillnessLanguage

'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.

Dictionaries date the steps roughly like this: foolish and timid by about 1300, fussy in the late 1300s, delicate around 1400, precise in the 1500s (still heard in 'a nice distinction'), agreeable from 1769 and kind from about 1830. Old senses lingered beside new ones, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in many 16th- and 17th-century texts it is hard to tell which one a writer meant. Linguists call a rise from a bad meaning to a good one amelioration; the reverse, pejoration, happened to 'silly', which in Old English meant happy or blessed. Jane Austen caught the new 'nice' spreading. In Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a Gothic novel 'the nicest book in the world', remarking that the word now 'does for everything'.

Merriam-WebsterRead card

DriveHealth

Protein helps with satiety, the feeling of fullness that lasts after a meal. Meals that include beans and lentils, eggs, fish, dairy or other protein sources can help people feel full for longer, although appetite and digestion vary from person to person.

In studies that compare meals with the same number of calories, the higher-protein version usually keeps people satisfied for longer, although the effect is modest. One reason is that protein prompts the gut to release more of the hormone PYY, which tells the brain that food has arrived; a 2006 study led by Rachel Batterham at University College London found the strongest PYY response after high-protein meals. Another is that the body works harder to process protein: a 2004 review by the Maastricht University physiologist Klaas Westerterp reports that digesting and using it burns 20 to 30% of its calories, against 5 to 10% for carbohydrate and up to 3% for fat. UK guidance puts adults' needs at about 0.75 g of protein per kilogram of body weight a day, around 45 g for women and 56 g for men, and average intakes are well above that.

NHSRead card

StillnessHealth

The fibre we eat comes from plant foods: fruit, vegetables, wholegrains, beans and lentils, nuts and seeds. Meat, fish, eggs and dairy naturally contain none.

Fibre is the part of plant food that our digestive enzymes cannot break down. Much of it comes from the walls of plant cells, which give stems, peel and seeds their structure. Animals do not make these substances, so meat, fish, eggs and milk contain none. Mushrooms, which are fungi rather than plants, also supply a little fibre from their own cell walls. Nutritionists divide fibre into two kinds. Soluble fibre, found in oats, barley, apples and beans, dissolves in water in the gut, can form a gel and helps lower cholesterol. Insoluble fibre, in wholegrains, brown rice, nuts and the skins of fruit and vegetables, adds bulk and helps food pass through. Once fibre reaches the large intestine, gut bacteria ferment part of it into short-chain fatty acids, compounds that feed the cells lining the bowel.

NHS InformRead card

StillnessHealth

Whole fruit keeps its fibre and cell structure, so it takes longer to eat and fills you up more than juice. Juicing breaks the cells open and frees their sugars, which are harder on teeth. The NHS therefore counts juice as one of your five daily portions at most, and advises no more than 150ml a day.

In a 2009 study at Pennsylvania State University, Julie Flood-Obbagy and Barbara Rolls gave 58 adults an apple, apple sauce or apple juice 15 minutes before lunch, each with the same weight and calories. After the whole apple, people felt fuller and ate about 15% fewer calories across the starter and lunch together than on days with no starter. Juice did not have that effect, even with the apple's fibre added back. A larger Harvard analysis of about 187,000 American health professionals, published in the BMJ in 2013, found that people who ate more whole fruit, especially blueberries, grapes and apples, were less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, while those who drank more fruit juice were slightly more likely to. Long-term observational studies like this show a link rather than proof of cause, but the two kinds of evidence point the same way.

NHS InformRead card

StillnessHealth

Water makes up about 60% of an adult's body weight. The body needs it to control its temperature, keep blood flowing, digest food and keep organs working. When lost fluid is not replaced, thirst can come with tiredness, headache, dizziness and poorer concentration.

Every day we lose water in urine, in sweat and even in our breath, and more in hot weather or during exercise. About a fifth of what we take in comes from food, especially fruit and vegetables, and the rest from drinks. The NHS suggests 6 to 8 glasses of fluid a day, and water, lower-fat milk, tea and coffee all count. Thirst is the body's alarm: when the blood becomes slightly too concentrated, sensors in the hypothalamus, a small region at the base of the brain, trigger the urge to drink. This alarm weakens with age, which is one reason older people become dehydrated more easily. A simple check is the colour of urine: the NHS advises drinking enough to keep it a clear pale yellow, and darker urine is a sign to drink more.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public HealthRead card

StillnessHealth

While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

Harvard Medical SchoolRead card

DriveHealth

Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

CDCRead card

DriveHealth

Regular physical activity protects the heart, lifts mood, eases anxiety and improves sleep, according to the World Health Organization. These benefits do not depend on losing weight: people of every shape and size gain them, even when nothing changes on the scales or in the mirror.

The World Health Organization counts any movement that uses energy as physical activity: walking, cycling, sport, active play, housework and physical work. Its 2020 guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus muscle-strengthening exercise on at least two days. In 2022 about 31% of adults worldwide, some 1.8 billion people, fell short of that. Weight is a poor guide to these benefits. The US Physical Activity Guidelines state that they are generally independent of body weight, and a 2014 analysis of ten studies found that fit people who were overweight or obese had death rates similar to fit people of normal weight, while unfit people had about twice the risk, whatever their weight.

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