Quotes by Scholars - Page 3

In joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends.
Kakuzō Okakura
The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
Richard M. Weaver
Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.
Hugh Nibley
At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.
William Arrowsmith
If the only hammer you are given is the Internet, it's not surprising that every possible social and political problem is presented as an online nail.
Evgeny Morozov
Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark
M.R. James
Your library is your paradise.
Erasmus
In more ancient times the life was simpler, but now the discovery of all these different medicines for curing dyspepsia shows that people are suffering from this disease. In this country we know that there are so many kinds of pills and medicines used. We even have those in India now. These things show that not only in America but in all the countries of the world we have to recourse to artificial means for necessary nutrients because people are not aware of right rules of diet. It is better to follow the right rules of diet in the beginning in order to avoid any kind of artificial medicines later on.
Virchand Gandhi
What the myth founds is a double existence between the upper world and the underworld: a dimension of death is introduced into life, and a dimension of life is introduced into death.
Walter Burkert
Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.
Chantal Zabus
The standard cosmological theory--an expanding universe--does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient conundrum, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing, and the "axiom" that "Nothing is unstable' rivals in scholastic absurdity anything Aquinas may have said eight hundred years ago and can only be postulated given the reality of something, whereby it becomes a self-evident and unarguable tautology.
R. Joseph Hoffmann
Whether they are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave: the full realization of their innate gifts, and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius. In the psyches of such people there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them is blind to it.
Malidoma Patrice Somé
If we are considering the history of our own country, we write at length of the periods when our ancestors were prosperous and victorious, but we pass quickly over their shortcomings or their defeats. Our people are represented as patriotic heroes, their enemies as grasping imperialists, or subversive rebels. In other words, our national histories are propaganda, not well balanced investigation.
John Bagot Glubb
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
Kakuzō Okakura
While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.
Tom Shippey
During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.
Jonathan Bate
In the distance,far over there, only the eyes can travel when the body is weary.
Yvette Christiansë
privation is the cause of appetite
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Marxist Man could not have come upon the earth at a more illogical time. In an age when technological advances have finally made it feasible to adequately feed, clothe and house the entire human race, Marxist Man stands as a military threat to this peaceful achievement. His sense of insecurity drives him to demand exclusive control of human affairs in a day when nearly all other peoples would like to create a genuine United nations dedicated to world peace and world-wide prosperity. Although man can travel faster than sound and potentially provide frequent, intimate contacts between all cultures and all peoples, Marxist Man insists on creating iron barriers behind which he can secretly work.
W. Cleon Skousen
The United States initially poured money and arms into Pakistan in the hope of building a major fighting force that could assist in defending Asia against communism. Pakistan repeatedly failed to live up to its promises to provide troops for any of the wars the United States fought against communist forces, instead using American weapons in its wars with India.
Husain Haqqani
I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents--peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them--felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
If a man spreads his secret with his own tongue and blames another... then he is a fool. If his own breast is too narrow to conceal his own secret, then the breast of the one in whom he places it is even narrower.
Imam ash-Shafi`i
If dual torment is to be my one condition,both of loving and being loved I would quit.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
I’ve never known fear; as a youth I fought/ In endless battles. I am old, now,/ But I will fight again, seek fame still,/ If the dragon hiding in his tower dares/ To face me
Burton Raffel
Farsi Couplet: Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast. English Translation: If there is a paradise on earth, It is this, it is this, it is this
Amir Khusrau
Farsi Couplet:Naala-e zanjeer-e Majnun arghanoon-e aashiqanastZauq-e aan andaza-e gosh-e ulul-albaab neestEnglish Translation:The creaking of the chain of Majnun is the orchestra of the lovers,To appreciate its music is quite beyond the ears of the wise.
Amir Khusrau
White in the moon the long road lies,The moon stands blank above;White in the moon the long road liesThat leads me from my love.Still hangs the hedge without a gust,Still, still the shadows stay:My feet upon the moonlit dustPursue the ceaseless way.The world is round, so travellers tell,And straight through reach the track,Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,The way will guide one back.But ere the circle homeward hiesFar, far must it remove:White in the moon the long road liesThat leads me from my love.
A.E. Housman
Huysmans takes the old trope of moon-as-woman and replaces its romantic connotations with decadent ones: the moon here is woman as clamorous lunatic, as convulsive epileptic.
Charles Bernheimer
The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.
Guy Davenport
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree.
Erasmus
Magic is not something supernatural, but part of the field dynamics of nature.
John Myrdhin Reynolds
Grammar is politics by other means.
Donna J. Haraway
Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")
Cameron Awkward-Rich
But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.
Kakuzō Okakura
If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.
Saidiya V. Hartman
Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.
Cedric J. Robinson
Oh fair enough are sky and plain,But I know fairer far:Those are as beautiful againThat in the water are;The pools and rivers wash so cleanThe trees and clouds and air,The like on earth was never seen,And oh that I were there.These are the thoughts I often thinkAs I stand gazing downIn act upon the cressy brinkTo strip and dive and drown;But in the golden-sanded brooksAnd azure meres I spyA silly lad that longs and looks And wishes he were I.
A.E. Housman
Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
A.E. Housman
The amazing activity of the cat is delicately balanced by his capacity for relaxation. Every household should contain a cat, not only for decorative and domestic values, but because the cat in quiescence is medicinal to irritable, tense, tortured men and women.
William Lyon Phelps
If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.
Warren G. Bennis
Fire In The HeavensFire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,and fire made solid in the flinty stone,thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fillsthe breathless hour that lives in fire alone.This valley, long ago the patient bedof floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.Behind the veil of burning silence bound,vast life's innumerous busy littlenessis hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of soundthat dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unlesssome dazzling puncture let the stridence throngin the cicada's torture-point of song.
Christopher John Brennan
I seeIn many an eye that measures meThe mortal sickness of a mindToo unhappy to be kind.Undone with misery, all they canIs to hate their fello
A.E. Housman
If they succeed, it will not matter if Man becomes immortal.He will have nothing to live for.
James Edwin Gunn
Don't get so holy, Pearce. Life isn't holy.
James Edwin Gunn
The picture of the bacchante who stands motionless and stares into space must have been well known. Catullus is thinking of her when he tells of the abandoned Ariadne, who follows her faithless lover with sorrowing eyes as she stands on the reedy shore ‘like the picture of a maenad.’ Indeed, melancholy silence becomes the sign of women who are possessed by Dionysus. […]Madness dwells in the surge of clanging, shrieking, and pealing sounds, it dwells also in silence. The women who follow Dionysus get their name, maenads, from this madness. Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles, or stand still, as if turned to stone.
Walter F. Otto
The seeker for perfection must discover in his own life the reflection of the inner light.
Kakuzō Okakura
Taoism as the "art of being in the world," for it deals with the present—ourselves. It is in us that God meets with Nature, and yesterday parts from to-morrow. The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzō Okakura
Iniquity it is; but pass the can.tMy lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;Our only portion is the estate of man:tWe want the moon, but we shall get no more. (Last Poems, IX)
A.E. Housman
We must truly listen to each other, respecting our essential brotherhood and the courage of those who try to speak, however they may differ from us in professional standing or religious belief or moral vision. We must speak and listen patiently, with good humor, with real expectation, and our dialogue can serve both truth and charity.
Eugene England
Full many a gem of purest ray sereneThe dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Thomas Gray
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.
Donna J. Haraway
Blasphemy has always seemedto require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play.
Donna Haraway
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
Lewis Hyde
...the very greatest satire, I came to think -- the kind that lives forever -- ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn't take yourself *that* seriously. You were part of it. All the Lilliputian preening and pomposity was, at bottom, one's own.
Terry Castle
One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites.
Kakuzō Okakura
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leadersare made rather than born.
Warren G. Bennis
Most love stories are nocturnal. That's what makes them so fascinating.
Raymond Federman
These summer nights are short. Going to bed before midnight is unthinkable and talk, wine, moonlight and the warm air are often in league to defer it one, two or three hours more. It seems only a moment after falling asleep out of doors that dawn touches one gently on the shoulder, and, completely refreshed, up one gets, or creeps into the shade or indoors for another luxurious couple of hours. The afternoon is the time for real sleep: into the abyss one goes to emerge when the colours begin to revive and the world to breathe again about five o'clock, ready once more for the rigours and pleasures of late afternoon, the evening, and the night.
Patrick Leigh Fermor