Category: Thought

We are sorely deficient in talking with each other and listening to each other. We lack mobility, criticism and self-criticism. We incline to doctrinism. What makes it worse is that so many people do not really want to think. They want only slogans and obedience. They ask no questions and they give no answers, except by repeating drilled-in phrases. They can only assert and obey, neither probe nor apprehend. Thus they cannot be convinced, either.

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (1947), E.B. Ashton, translator.

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16.

What though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.

Herman Melville, the complete epigram titled “A Reasonable Constitution” in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Howard P. Vincent Ed. (Chicago 1947).

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams (1859), Ch. 27.

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in Putnam’s Magazine (November and December 1853 ); revised to final form in The Piazza Tales (1856).

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

Rudyard Kipling, “On the Strength of a Likeness” in Plain Tales from the Hills (1889).

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Literary World (August 17 & 24, 1850).

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists: The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772.

On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to Odyssey, the Apollo command and service module, while en route to the Moon.

Sejamos simples e calmos,
Como os regatos e as árvores,
E Deus amar-nos-á fazendo de nós
Belos como as árvores e os regatos,
E dar-nos-á verdor na sua primavera,
E um rio aonde ir ter quando acabemos . . .
E não nos dará mais nada, porque dar-nos mais seria tirar-nos mais.

Let’s be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us, even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end . . .
And he’ll give us nothing more, since to give us more would make us less us.

Fernando Pessoa writing under the heteronym Alberto Caeiro, O Guardador de Rebanhos (“The Keeper of Sheep”), VI — in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2006).