It is axiomatic in the art of war that the side which remains behind its fortified line is always defeated.

Napoleon Bonaparte

As we move up our space/time-line, what will be has been, what has been remains, now is just now.

An errant thought.

Creatures of a day, what is anyone?  What is he not?  Man is but a dream of a shadow.  Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rest upon men a radiant light.

Pindar, Odes for Victorious Athletes

Who can fathom the soundless depths?

Jules Verne, riffing on the Book of Ecclesiastes in his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Capitalism is a partnership between governors and merchants that secures the power of both.... merchants grow rich because state power protects them or looks away when the time is right.

Martha Howell, The New York Review (April 7, 2016)

Complaining doesn't have to do good, it just feels good!

Jules Verne, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea

Suffering is not as easy as it looks.


Overheard...

In essence, the planet runs on a cycle of water-splitting by photosynthesis to form oxygen and the production of water by respiration.

Paul G. Falkowski in Life's Engines:  How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

Today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.


Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (February 55, 2016)

It was impossible for any one to open his grief to a neighbor and to concert measures to defend himself, as he would have had to speak either to one whom he did not know, or whom he knew but did not trust.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

How many fruitless pranks this ruffian hath botch'd up.

Shakespeare -- Twelfth Night

Love of country is what I do not feel when I am wronged, but what I felt when secure in my rights as a citizen.... the true lover of his country is not he who consents to lose it unjustly rather than attack it, but he who longs for it so much that he will go all lengths to recover it.

Alcibiades, as quoted by Thucydides, (The History of the Peloponnesian War)

It will be said, perhaps, that democracy is neither wise nor equitable, but that the holders of property are also the best fitted to rule.  I say, on the contrary, first, that the word demos, or people, includes the whole state, oligarchy only a part; next, that if the best guardians of property are the rich, and the best counselors the wise, none can hear and decide so well as the many; and that all these talents, severally and collectively, have their just place in a democracy. But an oligarchy gives the many their share of the danger, and not content with the largest part takes and keeps the whole of the profit.

 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Try to do what you do without mockery of our heartbroken little era. To mock is easy.

Anne Carson, 1=1, New Yorker of January 11, 2016

Athenians: Aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must....

Melians: As we think, at any rate, it is expedient —we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest— that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current....

Athenians:  Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.....  It is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best.

  Thucydides (Book Five), The History of the Peloponnesian War

It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.

 Thucydides (Book Four), The History of the Peloponnesian War

Ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters.

 Thucydides (Book Three), The History of the Peloponnesian War

There can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name , unless the parties be persuaded of each other's honesty, and be generally congenial the one to the other; since from difference in feeling springs also difference in conduct.

 Thucydides (Chapter IV), The History of the Peloponnesian War

[Pericles] told them to wait quietly, to pay attention to their marine, to attempt no new conquests, and to expose the city to no hazards during the war, and doing this, promised them a favourable result. What they did was the very contrary, allowing private ambitions and private interests, in matters apparently quite foreign to the war, to lead them into projects unjust both to themselves and to their allies— projects whose success would only conduce to the honour and advantage of private persons, and whose failure entailed certain disaster on the country in the war.... each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

"Or as [John Gray] put it in Straw Dogs:  The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industralisation, 'Western civilization' or any flaw in human institutions.  It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate."


David Bromwich, "Are We ‘Exceptionally Rapacious Primates’?", The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2015)

Human beings ... may be divided simply into those who know they are acting and those who do not. True philosophers belong to the first group. The second encompasses, among others, utopian capitalists and Communists, the fanatics of the religious wars of the seventeenth century and the jihadists of the twenty-first.

David Bromwich, "Are We ‘Exceptionally Rapacious Primates’?", The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2015)

Why are we so often awake? What is the purpose of being awake? I mean, besides for ten minutes of eating, a little bit of romance. Once that’s over, why are we not immediately again asleep?”

Rivka Galchen, Usl at the Stadium (The New Yorker, October 12, 2015)

Your country has a right to your services in sustaining the glories of her position. These are a common source of pride to you all, and you cannot decline the burdens of empire and still expect to share its honors. You should remember also that what you are fighting against is not merely slavery as an exchange for independence, but also loss of empire and danger from the animosities incurred in its exercise. Besides, to recede is no longer possible.... For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.

Pericles, as quoted by Thucydides in  The History of the Peloponnesian War

The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution.... they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine.... they are never at home.... they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War  (Translated by Richard Crawley; Book 1, Chapter 3)

[The Greeks] never pretended that their gods were always benevolent or omnipotent in human affairs... What was important was the maintenance of dignity and self-respect in the face of what the gods or fate decreed.


Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

The early [Greek] philosophers were concerned with understanding the nature of the cosmos.... They appear to have shared a belief that the world system, the kosmos, was subject to a divine force which gave it an underlying and orderly background. Where they got this idea, which is a far cry from the Homeric world of gods, is unknown – possibly from eastern mythology. It proved fundamental to the speculations which followed.

Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

Do not bring down the men of the magistrates' court or incite the just men to rebel.  Do not pay too much attention to him clad in shining garments, and have regard for him who is shabbily dressed.  Do not accept the reward of the powerful man or persecute the weal for him.

Advice from fathers to sons in Middle Kingdom Egypt as quoted by Charles Freeman in Egypt, Greece and Rome. 

Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.  The greater the slowing of time, the stronger gravity's pull....  At the surface of a black hole, time is slowed to a halt.

Kip Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

If I calculate the average annual quota required to limit global warming to two degrees this century I find that simply maintaining a typical American single-family home exceeds it in two weeks. Absent any indication of direct harm, what makes intuitive moral sense is to live the life I was given, be a good citizen, be kind to the people near me, and conserve as well as I reasonably can.... [Climate change] deeply confuses the human brain, which evolved to focus on the present, not the far future, and on readily perceivable movements, not slow and probabilistic developments.

Jonathan Franzen, "Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?" in the New Yorker of April 6, 2015

Personal happiness is profoundly conditioned by the social and political surroundings.

Tim Parks, "Revolutionary Italy: The Masterwork," New York Review (April 2, 2015)

[T]wo centuries ago ... Europeans made a wager on history: that the more they extended human freedom, the happier they would be. ... [T]hat wager has been lost.

Mark Lilla, "Slouching Toward Mecca,"  New York Review (April 2, 2015)

[R]elying on the Internet for facts and figures is making us mindless sloths.... a study in Science ...  demonstrates that the wealth of information readily available on the Internet disinclines users from remembering what they’ve found out.


Sue Halpern, "How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over," New York Review (April 2, 2015)

Most journeys...begin and all end with a sense of unreality.

Evelyn Waugh, When The Going Was Good

A life is like a garden.  Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.
Live long and prosper.

Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet

Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.

Evelyn Waugh, When The Going Was Good

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. 

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose.  It is best so, no doubt.  The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

The totality of animals, the crushing majority of men, live without ever finding the least need for justification.


Michel Houellebecq, from his novel Submission as quoted by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.

We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.

Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Twitter—that device helpfully enabling people to write faster than they can think.


 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, How the Murdoch Gang Got Away (New York Review, Jan 8, 2015)

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck on top of it, bivouacked above the tree line, free, but freezing, with no way forward.

Tim Parks, The New Yorker (Reverend)

The smartphone-bearing zombies plodding blindly down our sidewalks still inhabit the real world even if their souls have gone elsewhere.

James Gleick, The New York Review of Dec. 18, 2014.

When did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

My moment-by-moment happiness is pretty low, but my life satisfaction is great.

From The New York Review of Dec 4, 2014.

When you don't know where you're going, any road can get you lost.


A riff on Lewis Carroll

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

The entitlement to believe what on careful reflection seems to be the case, where there is no reason to doubt it, is the necessary condition for being able to form any justified beliefs at all. ... The only way to pursue the truth is to consider what seems true, after careful reflection of a kind appropriate to the subject matter, in light of all the relevant data, principles, and circumstances.


Thomas Nagel, Listening to Reason (New York Review, October 9, 2014)

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

Albert Einstein, as quoted in the New York Review.  

What we look for does not happen;
what we least expect is fashioned by the gods.


Euripides, Bacchae (as quoted from Robin Robertson in the Sept. 25, 2014 New York Review)

The earth, the water, the fire, the air, and the void -- these indeed are the five principles by which the entire universe is pervaded.

Abhinavagupta, as quoted by Diana L. Eck in India: a Sacred Geography

Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life.  That is its job.  Your job is to notice.


Michael Harris, as quoted by The Economist (August 16, 2014)

Mammalian minds evolved to track external dangers and opportunities.... Only humans acquired an ability to focus solely on internal thoughts.... [But] people go to surprisingly great lengths to avoid being stranded with their own thoughts.

Science News, People Find Solitude Distressing

Today’s news is always old news. The innocent get slaughtered and someone makes up excuses.

Charles Simic, Portable Hell (NYR)

Shiva, they say, is twofold…. utterly transcendent and … “without parts”.… the source and essence of all…. But Shiva is also “with parts” [and] shows himself visibly in many forms…. The divine expands, evolving as if from seed, and stretching into the immense, indeed infinite reality of the cosmos, which lives and breathes.

From India: A Sacred Geography (Ch 5) by Diana L. Eck

There is no shore on the other side

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I cannot help thinking that liberal civilization—the rule of laws, not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of violence—runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature. The liberal virtues—tolerance, compromise, reason—remain as valuable as ever, but they cannot be preached to those who are mad with fear or mad with vengeance. In any case, preaching always rings hollow. We must be prepared to defend them by force, and the failure of the sated, cosmopolitan nations to do so has left the hungry nations sick with contempt for us.

Michael Ignatieff

Life should be a fight to the death.

Tarquin Hall, The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

It doesn't have to be understood to be real.

Peter Lanza

When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.


Attributed to Napoleon

Consciousness was indeed real.  It had observable energy.  That energy translated into movement, into work.  That energy ordered information, the stuff of the world, the matter, and recycled that order back into itself, lifting itself to ever higher ground.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music 

Consciousness was firmly embedded in the fabric of space and time, a material part of its vibrational energy.  Consciousness, or mind, was not split off from matter, hovering outside it.... Instead, consciousness was within matter, of matter.  It was matter looking at itself and being astonished.  It was the point seeing the wave, or the wave seeing the point.  Consciousness was quantum electrodynamism.  Time turned back upon itself.  Time splintering.  Time strutting loose among the energy levels, only slightly stilled, slightly caught, in that glance called consciousness, the observer, the energy that made it into this and not-this, live cat and dead cat.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music

Empowering friends, picking your battles, always checking principle with prudence, never overestimating American capacities, but never overestimating the enemy’s strength: this is best seen not as a strategy for all contingencies but as a disposition, a habit of mind, a temperament.

Michael Ignatieff on George Kennan's approach to US foreign policy, America's Melancholic Hero (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014).

Whenever there is a withering of the law
and an uprising of lawlessness on all sides,
then I manifest Myself.

For the salvation of the righteous
and the destruction of such as do evil,
for the firm establishing of the Law,
I come to birth, age after age.

 Bhagavad Gita, Book IV, Sutra 5, 7, 8

Ullrich told me about a small boy who was dying of neuroblastoma. “His mother made it very clear to him that she would see him again in Heaven someday. ... But he was worried about how he would find her. So they made a plan to meet in the front left corner of Heaven."

Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker, "Lives Less Ordinary" (January 20, 2014)

Christmas time ... a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. 


Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.

Abraham Lincoln on the effort to preserve the United States government in America's Civil War, from his First Message to Congress, July 4, 1861.

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure;
but security enough to make fellowships accurst.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Thou art not thyself;
For thou exists on many a thousand grains
That issue out of the dust.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

O place, O form,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming!

Blood, thou art blood.


William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est

(“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”).

Quoted by Pope Francis on the vision of St. Ignatius

You should only pick your own nose.


Heard from a nice lady in Iowa.

Relationships were ... utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life.  We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

To Evening

You set me and my thoughts a-wandering
along the path to the eternal void; and then
this wretched time flees, and with it
the throng of woes afflicting it and me;
and while I behold your peacefulness, that warlike
spirit that rages within me sleeps. 

From "Alla sera" by Ugo Foscolo, translated by Allen Shearer, seen on a Metro bus

"Creation" in [the] Hindu view of things is designated by the word srishthi, literally the "pouring forth" of the universe from the source.  As a complex plant or tree grows, bursting forth and developing from the simple unitary seed, or as a complex creature emerges and grows from an embryo, so is this whole and diverse universe poured forth from the ... very body of the divine.  There is no God who stands apart from it and creates it.... everything is a manifestation that has poured forth from the living body of the Whole, what some would call God.... Within this systemic whole, everything is alive and interrelated. 

Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography

When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

[History] doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Mark C. Elliott, quoted in "Laptop U", The New Yorker (May 20, 2013)

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios

At the end we dream of the beginning.

James Church, The Man with the Baltic Stare

Sooner or later, you learn things.  You don't realize until it's too late that you learned something; and then you don't remember where, or how, or why.  There's no voice that automatically pipes up: ... Attention! Learning Experience!

James Church, Bamboo and Blood

Mistakes are good.  The more mistakes, the better.  People who make mistakes get promoted.  They can be trusted.  Why?  They're not dangerous.  They can't be too serious.  People who don't make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability.  They might land on you.

James Church, A Corpse in the Koryo

We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good.
What authority surfeits on would relieve us: if they
would yield us but the superfluity, while it were
wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely;
but they think we are too dear: the leanness that
afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an
inventory to particularise their abundance; our
sufferance is a gain to them Let us revenge this with
our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (Act 1, Scene 1) 

The longer I live the more convinced I am that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

Shiva Naipaul, quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Feb 2002 Atlantic magazine.

Truth is one.  The wise speak of it in many ways.

Rig Veda

Montailou culture was directed towards mere reproduction, self-preservation and the perpetuation of the domus in the world below.  The only element of "growth" which happened to manifest itself early in the 14th century had little to do with economics.  It was concerned with the after-life and with a kind of spiritual transcendence, locally centered on the Albigensian idea of Heaven.  … Montaillou is the physical warmth of the ostal, together with the ever-recurring promise of a peasant heaven.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The promised Land of Error

When done for reasons other than competition, physical exercise ... can be a simultaneous act of peaceful prayer (talking to God) and deep meditation (listening to God), allowing me the space to ask without using words while listening to answers that I know already exist: an inner guidance of divinity achieved through outer exertion.

Romano Scaturro, 50@50

I'm a treetop flyer,
Born Survivor.

Stephen Stills, Treetop Flyer

Fate freely accepted ... is this not the very definition of Grace?

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - in Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error - talking of the life of a 14th Century sheep herder of Occitania.

Having noted Chinese immobility, they gained a clearer sense of their own motion.  Their appreciation of individual initiative was enhanced as they noted that individuals in China could undertake only what society expected of them.  They grasped more sharply the strength of the human personality in the West by observing that the only recognized human entity in China was the collective.  They took the measure of the role of competition in their own country when they saw that no one in China could escape his assigned place, for to do so would offend against the established hierarchy.  They saw more clearly how important merchants were in Britain by observing how deeply they were scorned in China.  They became aware of their own devotion to the new by discovering the cult of the immutable.  In short, they gained a clearer insight into the fact that individualism, competition, and innovation were the wellsprings of their own wealth and power.

Alain Peyrefitte's observation, on the "failed" Macartney expedition to China 1792-94, in his masterful The Collision of Two Civilisations. 

The world is full of ways and means to waste time.


Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance

Te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora,
Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.

(May I be looking at you when my last hour has come,
And dying may I hold you with my weakening hand.)

Tibullus

She hated the urgency with which some people read newspapers, their belief that the mere knowledge of certain events - belated, incomplete, and often false knowledge - made them active participants in society.

Lara Vapnyar, "Fischer vs Spassky," in The New Yorker of October 8, 2012

Despite knowing what it takes to be content, a man might still be unhappy.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

To God belongs the East and the West.  May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

Sometimes it is not wise to persist in explaining oneself.

Amitay Ghosh, River of Smoke.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements--surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7