Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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WonderHistory

Much of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.

Parchment and papyrus decay, so an ancient text survived only if someone kept making fresh copies. In the 9th and 10th centuries Byzantine scribes adopted a smaller, joined-up handwriting called minuscule and recopied the classics in it. Few of the older manuscripts were kept, so for many ancient authors the oldest surviving copy dates from this period. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, summarised 279 books he had read; almost half are now lost, so for many of them his notes are our main record. His pupil Arethas, later archbishop of Caesarea, today's Kayseri, had manuscripts copied that preserve works by Plato and Marcus Aurelius; his Plato is now in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The 10th-century Suda, an encyclopaedia of some 30,000 entries, also quotes many lost sources. This revival of learning is known as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the ruling dynasty.

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StillnessLiterature

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

The saying goes back to al-Jahiz (c. 776–868), a master of Arabic prose who grew up poor in Basra, in Iraq, selling fish to help his family. Praising books in a famous passage, he called the book a vessel filled with knowledge, a garden carried in a sleeve and a meadow turned over in the lap, one that speaks for the dead and passes on the words of the living. Later versions put the garden in a pocket. Legend says he died under a fallen pile of books.

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StillnessLiterature

What you sow is what you reap.

Turkish has the proverb in exactly this form; English says “As you sow, so shall you reap.” The image is far older: Cicero's On the Orator (55 BC) records a Roman politician using it as a retort in a debate over a new law, “Ut sementem feceris, ita metes.” About a century later, Paul used it in his Letter to the Galatians. Turkish also has a sharper version, “rüzgâr ekip fırtına biçmek”, to sow the wind and reap the storm: to meet far worse than the harm one did.

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StillnessLiterature

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

The line is often shared as a saying of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, but no reliable source ties it to him. It is usually credited to Ram Dass, reportedly from his book Be Here Now (1971), though the exact source is unclear. Born Richard Alpert, he taught psychology at Harvard, went to India in 1967 and became a disciple of the guru Neem Karoli Baba. It describes a common experience in meditation: as the mind's chatter settles, you notice sounds and thoughts that were there all along.

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StillnessLiterature

Character is destiny.

Heraclitus lived around 500 BC in Ephesus, the Greek city whose ruins stand near Selçuk in western Turkey. Only fragments of his one book survive, quoted by later writers; this is fragment 119, ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn, “for a human being, character is daimon”. A daimon was the guardian spirit believed to decide each person's lot, and Heraclitus places that power in our own character. George Eliot quotes “character is destiny” in The Mill on the Floss (1860), adding that it is not the whole of our destiny.

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StillnessLiterature

You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.

Near the end of The Trial, a prison chaplain tells Josef K., a bank official arrested for a crime nobody will name, the parable “Before the Law”: a man from the country waits all his life at an open door to the Law, and the doorkeeper never lets him in. As they argue over its meaning, the priest says this, warning K. not to lean on any single reading. Kafka left the novel unfinished; his friend Max Brod published it in 1925, after Kafka's death.

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StillnessLiterature

The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.

Leo Strauss (1899–1973), a German-born Jewish philosopher, emigrated to the United States in 1937 and taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago for twenty years. He is best known for arguing that many past thinkers wrote between the lines, hiding their boldest ideas from persecution for careful readers to find. In Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) he says this of Livy, the Roman historian whose work Machiavelli discussed: when a wise author is silent where others would speak, it is not forgetfulness but a quiet departure from the common view.

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