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John Ruskin

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English author, poet and painter, most famous for his work as art critic and social critic.

Quotes

 * The water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven; and the water which is found in the vessel of mercy is holy, though it had been defiled with corpses.
 * The King of the Golden River or The Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria (1841), Ch. 5 : How Little Gluck Set off on an expedition to the Golden River, and how he prospered therein, with other matters of interest. • Full text online

 * No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.
 * Pre-Raphaelitism, section 1 (1851)

 * The zealous care with which J. M. W. Turner endeavoured to do his duty, is proved by a large existing series of drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely coloured, all by his own hand, of the most difficult perspective subjects—illustrating not only directions of line, but effects of light - with a care and completion which would put the work of any ordinary teacher to utter shame. In teaching generally — he would neither waste time nor spare it - he would look over a student's drawing at the Academy, point to a defective part, make a scratch on the paper at the side, say nothing. If the student saw what was wanted, and did it, Turner was delighted; but if the student could not follow. Turner left him.
 * Quote, c. 1850's; describing Turner's perspective lectures; as quoted in The life of J.M.W. Turner, Volume II, George Walter Thornbury; Hurst and Blackett Publishers, London, 1862, p. 108

 * There is but one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or wrong? If right, it most assuredly is not a "free" line, but an intensely continent, restrained and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as "free" as the hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision.
 * Cestus of Aglaia, chapter VI, section 72 (1865-66)

 * For when we are interested in the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told over and over again, and stopping always at the same point — we want a new story presently, a newer and better one — and the picture of the day, and novel of the day, become as ephemeral as the coiffure or the bonnet of the day. Now this spirit is wholly adverse to the existence of any lovely art. If you mean to throw it aside to-morrow, you can never have it to-day.
 * On the Condition of Modern Art, lecture (1867)

 * Punishment is the last and least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
 * Notes on the General Principles of Employment for the Destitute and Criminal Classes (1868)

 * Engraving is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.
 * Ariadne Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix, lecture I: Definition of the Art of Engraving, section 34 (1872)

 * In great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to keep them children.
 * Mornings in Florence, part III, section 49 (1875)

 * Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.
 * St. Mark's Rest: The History of Venice (1877)

 * Without perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.
 * At the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1877), in Arrows of the Chase, vol. 2 (in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 23), p. 129

 * Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night beat — as far as the acting and story went — and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless and scrannelpipiest — tongs and boniest — doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound — not excepting railway whistles — as I was by the cessation of the cobbler’s bellowing.
 * On Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger
 * Letter to (June 30, 1882)

 * My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.
 * Praeterita, volume I, chapter IX (1885-1889)

 * There is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
 * Quoted by John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, The Use of Life, chapter IV: "Recreation" (1894)

The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)

 * There is nothing so small but that we may honour God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.
 * Introductory

 * It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.
 * Chapter II: The Lamp of Truth, section 1

 * I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface.
 * Chapter III: The Lamp of Power, section 13

 * Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.
 * Chapter IV: The Lamp of Beauty, section 19

 * When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
 * Chapter VI: The Lamp of Memory, section 10

 * How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.
 * Chapter VII: The Lamp of Obedience, section 1

The Stones of Venice (1853)

 * You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased with them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
 * Volume I, chapter II, section 17

 * In old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting.
 * Volume II, chapter IV, section 103

 * Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.
 * Volume II, chapter V, section 30

 * The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
 * Volume II, chapter V, section 30

 * You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves….On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make him a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.
 * Volume II, chapter VI, section 12

 * We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that it divided; but the men: — Divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, — sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is — we should think that there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach at them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can only be met by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.
 * Volume II, chapter VI, section 16

 * Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect in its own bad way.
 * Volume II, chapter VI, section 24

 * We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself. It consists of certain proportions and arrangements of rays of light, but not in likeness to anything. A few touches of certain greys and purples laid by a master's hand on white paper will be good colouring; as more touches are added beside them, we may find out that they were intended to represent a dove's neck, and we may praise, as the drawing advances, the perfect imitation of the dove's neck. But the good colouring does not consist in that imitation, but in the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and purple.
 * Volume II, chapter VI, section 42

 * The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things.
 * Volume II, chapter VI, section 62

 * The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
 * Volume III

 * He who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.
 * Volume III, chapter II, section 99

 * The first sight of the tomb Ilario di Carreto at Lucca at once altered the course of my life for me… and from that day I left the upholsterer's business in art to those who trade in it, and have guided my work, and limited my teaching, only by the sacred laws of truth and devotion which created the perfect schools of Christian art in Florence and Venice.
 * Epilogue (Works Vol XI, Page 239)

A Joy for Ever (1857)

 * You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm — we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish — ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame.
 * Lecture II: The Accumulation and Distribution of Art, section 74

 * The greatest minds are marked by nothing more distinctly than an inconceivable humility, and acceptance of work or instruction in any form, and from any quarter. They will learn from everybody, and do anything that anybody asks, so long as it involves only toil, or what other men would think degradation.
 * Addenda, note 4, section 137

 * For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.
 * Addenda, note 6, section 141

The Two Paths (1859)

 * Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
 * Lecture II: The Unity of Art, section 54

 * Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
 * Lecture IV: The Influence of Imagination in Architecture, section 137

 * One of the chief reasons for the maintenance of an army is the advantage of the military system as a method of education. The most fiery and headstrong, who are often also the most gifted and generous of your youths, have always a tendency both in the lower and upper classes to offer themselves for your soldiers: others, weak and unserviceable in the civil capacity, are tempted or entrapped into the army in a fortunate hour for them: out of this fiery or uncouth material, it is only soldier's discipline which can bring the full value and power. Even at present, by mere force of order and authority, the army is the salvation of myriads; and men who, under other circumstances, would have sunk into lethargy or dissipation, are redeemed into noble life by a service which at once summons and directs their energies.
 * Lecture V: The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy, p. 194

 * You may either win your peace, or buy it:—win it, by resistance to evil;—buy it, by compromise with evil.
 * Lecture V: The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy, section 196

Modern Painters (1843-1860)

 * He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
 * Volume I, part I, chapter II, section 9 (1843)

 * The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.
 * Volume II, part III, section I, chapter V (1846)

 * I believe that the root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian church has ever suffered, has been the effort of men to earn, rather than to receive, their salvation.
 * Volume II, part III, section I, chapter XV (1846)

 * There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter VII (1856)

 * The word "Blue" does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not a man left on the face of the earth.
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter XII (1856)

 * All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic Fallacy."
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter XII (1856)

 * And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter XII (1856)

 * It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter XII (1856)

 * The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter XVI (1856)

 * To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.
 * Volume III, part IV, chapter XVI (1856)

 * In general, when the imagination is at all noble, it is irresistible, and therefore those who can at all resist it ought to resist it. Be a plain topographer if you possibly can; if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet.
 * Volume III, part V, chapter II (1856)

 * It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.
 * Volume III, part V, chapter II (1856)

 * In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
 * Volume IV, part V, chapter III, section 22 (1856)

 * All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree — not of a cloud.
 * Volume V, Preface (1860)

 * Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.
 * Volume V, part VIII, chapter I, section 2 (1860)

 * The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness — completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.
 * Volume V, part VIII, chapter 1, section 4 (1860)

 * In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
 * Volume V, part VIII, chapter III (1860)

 * Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.
 * Volume V, part IX, chapter III, section 52 (1860)

 * A monk of La Trappe, a French soldier of the Imperial Guard, and a thriving mill-owner, supposing each a type, and no more than a type, of his class, are all interesting specimens of humanity, but narrow ones, — so narrow that even all the three together would not make up a perfect man.
 * Volume V, part IX, chapter XI (1860)

 * There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall "inherit the earth." Neither covetous men, nor the Grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess.
 * Volume V, part IX, chapter XI (1860)

Unto This Last (1860)

 * “I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work.” By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be “chosen.” The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.
 * Essay I: "The Roots of Honour," section 29

 * Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that men of business rarely know the meaning of the word 'rich'. At least, if they know, they do not in their reasoning allow for the fact, that it is a relative word, implying its opposite 'poor' as positively as the word 'north' implies its opposite 'south'. Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pockets depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it,— and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.
 * Essay two: 'The Veins of Wealth'

 * Suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel; countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold — or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. His gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow pebbles on his estate. His stores must rot, for he cannot consume them. He can eat no more than another man could eat, and wear no more than another man could wear. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary comforts; he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair, or fields in cultivation; and forced to content himself with a poor man's portion of cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert of waste land, trampled by wild cattle, and encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he will hardly mock at himself by calling "his own."
 * Essay II: "The Veins of Wealth," section 29

 * ..the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.
 * Essay II: "The Veins of Wealth"

 * Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, they injure it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence.
 * Essay II: page 280

 * And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security, that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.
 * Essay III: "Qui Judicatis Terram," section 54

 * We need examples of people who, leaving Heaven to decide whether they are to rise in the world, decide for themselves that they will be happy in it, and have resolved to seek — not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of possessions, self-possession; and honouring themselves in the harmless pride and calm pursuits of peace.
 * Essay IV: "Ad Valorem," (p. 135 of | 1881 edition)

 * There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.
 * Essay IV: "Ad Valorem," section 77

The Crown of Wild Olive (1866)

 * Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money, — he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. "What will you make of what you have got?" you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.
 * Lecture I: Work, section 24

 * Now, if we want to work for this [God's] kingdom, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is one curious condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.
 * Lecture I: Work, section 46

 * A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.
 * Lecture III: War, section 114

 * What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
 * Lecture IV: The Future of England, section 151

Time and Tide (1867)

 * Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.
 * Letter V: Entertainment, section 21

 * Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it. Your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night.
 * Letter VIII: Things Written, section 33

 * To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education. Make them men first, and religious men afterwards, and all will be sound; but a knave's religion is always the rottenest thing about him.
 * Letter VIII: Things Written, section 33

 * The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attains years of discretion.
 * Letter XIII: Episcopacy and Dukedom, section 70

Sesame and Lilies (1864-1869)

 * The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
 * Lecture I: Sesame. Of Kings' Treasuries, section 3

 * And besides; the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question remains inexorable, —Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest, and for what pay?
 * Lecture I: Sesame. Of Kings' Treasuries, note to section 30

 * When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.
 * Lecture I: Sesame. Of Kings' Treasuries, section 39

 * He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only.
 * Lecture I: Sesame. Of Kings' Treasuries, section 42

 * "The work of men" — and what is that? Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it is a mortal one — we want to keep back part of the price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm in a cross was the weight of it — as if it was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be — crucified upon. "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."
 * Lecture III: The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, section 135

 * Levi's station in life was the receipt of custom; and Peter's, the shore of Galilee; and Paul's, the antechambers of the High- Priest,— which "station in life" each had to leave, with brief notice.
 * Lecture III: The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, section 135

 * Give such a girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.
 * Lecture III: The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, section 140
 * The opening four words of this quote are often paraphrased (drawing on the preceding lines) as "Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl..."

Lectures on Art (1870)

 * Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.
 * Lecture III

 * The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
 * Lecture III

 * The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, — either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.
 * Lecture IV

The Eagle's Nest (1872)

 * In all base schools of art, the craftsman is dependent for his bread on originality; that is to say, on finding in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, by which his work may be distinct from that of other men. We are ready enough to take delight in our little doings, without any such stimulus; — what must be the effect of the popular applause which continually suggests that the little thing we can separately do is as excellent as it is singular; and what the effect of the bribe, held out to us through the whole of life, to produce — it being also in our peril not to produce — something different from the work of our neighbors?
 * Lecture II, section 32

 * We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: — the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, — the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.
 * Lecture II, section 35

 * What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.
 * Lecture V, section 82

 * Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But ignorance discontented and dexterous, learning what it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manufacture that can disgrace or mislead humanity.
 * Lecture V, section 88

The Ethics of the Dust (1875)

 * I have always found that the less we speak of our intentions, the more chance there is of our realizing them.
 * Preface to the first edition, 1865

 * All of one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly and in time.
 * Lecture IV: The Crystal Orders, section 35

 * Do not think of your faults; still less of others' faults: in every person who comes near you, look for what is good and strong: honour that; rejoice in it; and, as you can, try to imitate it.
 * Lecture V: Crystal Virtues, section 57

 * God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the place where He wishes us to be employed; and that employment is truly "our Father's business." He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them, if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves, or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are not happy ourselves.
 * Lecture VI: Crystal Quarrels, section 72

 * All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.
 * Lecture VII: Home Virtues, section 80

Fors Clavigera (1871-1878 and 1880-1884)

 * You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you! That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them, then; not one of you cares for the loss of them, now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening, — Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light — walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley — you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange — you Fools Everywhere.
 * Fors Clavigera, letter v (1 May 1871)

 * An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.
 * Fors Clavigera, letter xxxiv (October 1873)

 * I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.
 * Fors Clavigera, letter xxxvii, (1 January 1874)

 * For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds.
 * Fors Clavigera,, letter xlii, (1 June 1874; quoted by William Archer in America To-Day)

 * Human work must be done thoroughly and honourably because we are now men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter.
 * Fors Clavigera, letter lxxvi (4 March 1877)

Disputed

 * There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.
 * Earliest print appearance (without quotation marks or attribution) is in a letter from J. A. Richards in a 1901 issue of an advertising trade journal.
 * According to Ruskin scholar George P. Landow, there is no evidence that this quotation or its variants can be found in any of Ruskin's works.

 * It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.
 * Known as the Common Law of Business Balance, this quotation has been widely attributed to Ruskin but has never been sourced to any of his works.

Misattributed

 * When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
 * Widely attributed on the Internet to John Ruskin; see this Google search for thousands of pages containing the quote AND "John Ruskin" but NOT "Charles Reade".
 * This is actually from Put Yourself in His Place by Charles Reade.

Quotes about Ruskin

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of the bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight as a bullet.
 * G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), ch. I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies

 * The point and stab of his challenge still really stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man.
 * G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), ch. I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies

 * Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases. Poets may not be "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"; but Ruskin, like Rousseau, changed the world by a vision which has the intensity and innocence of poetry.
 * Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today (1964), Section 5: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Society and Economics

 * The combination of shrewd common sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnestness ; the restlessness, the fervour, the impestuosity, — all these are characteristics of a Scotsman of parts and highly developed in Ruskin.
 * W. G. Collingwood, in The Life and Work of John Ruskin (1893) 2nd edition, p. 4

 * Mr Ruskin is morally Conservative, intellectually Radical.
 * W. G. Collingwood, in The Life and Work of John Ruskin (1893) 2nd edition, p. 216

 * The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism — the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation.
 * George Eliot, Westminster Review # 65 (April 1856)

 * I cannot therefore claim much book knowledge. However, I believe I have not lost much because of this enforced restraint. On the contrary, the limited reading may be said to have enabled me thoroughly to digest what I did read. Of these books, the one that brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was Unto This Last. I translated it later into Gujarati, entitling it Sarvodaya (the welfare of all). I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in a equal measure. The teaching of Unto This Last I understood to be: 1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2. That a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.
 * Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of my Experiments with Truth (1927-1929), trans. Mahadev Desai, Part IV, Ch. XVIII

 * Long and singular was Ruskin's journey through many landscapes, and his influence in all directions, social and aesthetic, was so remarkable that even those who have least predilection for it may perhaps call it the greatest event in our literary history since Lyrical Ballads and Waverley. At least one exceptionally good observer judged that as Carlyle...had written himself out as a source of social inspiration, it was Ruskin alone among writers of prose, apart from fiction, who relieved us from the reign of Commentators.
 * John Morley, Recollections, Volume I (1917), p. 16

 * He used to attend Mr. Gladstone's breakfasts, and at one of them the host pronounced three grand things to be done to the ways of the world by mankind. First, the introduction of more lenient and humane practice with prisoners; second, a general sentiment against war; and third, the abolition of slaves. "Yes," said Ruskin in his mild tones, "but then I don't think prisons ought to be made humane; and I'm not against slavery; and I'm not against war."
 * John Morley, Recollections, Volume I (1917), pp. 291-292

 * This lack of appreciation (for Lorrain) on Ruskin’s part is one of the many reasons why he was far from being the art critic that he considered himself
 * Mary Knight Potter, The Art of the Louvre George Bell (1904), p. 279

 * Ruskin's special gift was the feeling for beauty, in nature as in art. It was in Beauty that his nature led him to seek reality, and his entirely religious life received from it an entirely aesthetic use. But this Beauty to which he thus happened to dedicate his life was not conceived by him as an object of enjoyment made to charm, but as a reality infinitely more important than life, for which he would have given his own life. From this, as you will see, the whole aesthetic system of Ruskin follows. First, you will understand that the years when he became acquainted with a new school of architecture or of painting were the principal landmarks in the development of his ethics. He would speak of the years when Gothic art presented itself to him with the same gravity, the same emotional nostalgia, the same serenity with which a Christian speaks of the day the truth was revealed to him.
 * Marcel Proust, preface to La Bible d'Amiens (1904), Proust's translation of Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens; from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-300-04503-4 ), trans. Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe, pp. 33-34

 * He [John Ruskin] knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do; he puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended.
 * J. M. W. Turner, c. 1840's; as quoted by George Walter Thornbury, in The life of J.M.W. Turner, Volume II; Hurst and Blackett Publishers, London, 1862, p. 130; Turner did not appear to be pleased with Ruskin's superlative eulogies, according to Peter Cunningham

 * Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.
 * Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899)

 * The style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us. After a time, falling into a passion with this indolent pleasure-loving temper in his readers, Ruskin checked his fountains, and curbed his speech to the very spirited, free and almost colloquial English in which Fors Clavigera and Praeterita are written. In these changes, and in the restless play of his mind upon one subject after another, there is something, we scarcely know how to define it, of the wealthy and cultivated amateur, full of fire and generosity and brilliance, who would give all he possesses of wealth and brilliance to be taken seriously, but who is fated to remain for ever an outsider.
 * Virginia Woolf, "Ruskin," from The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (1950)

title: John Ruskin


text:
Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842), more widely known as Stendhal, the most famous of his many pen-names, was a 19th century French writer.

Quotes

 * Revenir souvent ici (sur le lac de Côme) est comme une goutte de poison ; ça donne envie de ne jamais partir.
 * Coming back here often (on Lake Como) is like a drop of poison; it makes you want to never leave.
 * Il Giornale, Giorgia Gandola, 7 march 2008

 * (Le Centre du Lac) … et le hardi promontoire qui sépare les deux branches du lac, celle de Come, si voluptuense et celle qui court vers Lecco, plein de sévérité; aspect sublime et gracieux, que le site le plus renommé du monde, la baie de Naples, égale, mais ne surpasse point...
 * (Center Lake Como)... and the bold promontory that separates the two branches of the lake, that of Como, so voluptuous, and that which runs towards Lecco, full of severity; a sublime and graceful aspect, which the most renowned site in the world, the Bay of Naples, equals, but does not surpass...
 * First edition of La Chartreuse de Parme, p. 24 (1840)

 * Presque tous les malheurs de la vie viennent des fausses idées que nous avons sur ce qui nous arrive. Connaître à fond les hommes, juger sainement des événements, est donc un grand pas vers le bonheur.
 * Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.
 * Journal entry (10 December 1801)

 * Comme homme, j'ai le cœur 3 ou 4 fois moins sensible, parce que j'ai 3 ou 4 fois plus de raison et d'expérience du monde, ce que vous autres femmes appelez dureté de cœur. Comme homme, j'ai la ressource d'avoir des maîtresses. Plus j'en ai et plus le scandale est grand, plus j'acquiers de réputation et de brillant dans le monde.
 * Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world — a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.
 * Letter to his sister Pauline (29 August 1804)

 * Je ne vois qu'une règle: être clair. Si je ne suis pas clair, tout mon monde est anéanti.
 * I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
 * Letter to Honoré de Balzac, Civita Vecchia (30 October 1840)

 * Le même esprit ne dure que deux cents ans.
 * Wit lasts no more than two centuries.
 * Letter to Honoré de Balzac (30 October 1840)

 * Ce sera la noblesse de leur style qui, dans quarante ans, rendra illisibles nos écrivains de 1840.
 * It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
 * Marginalia note, first edition of La Chartreuse de Parme (1840)

 * L'amour a toujours été pour moi la plus grande des affaires ou plutôt la seule.
 * Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.
 * La Vie d'Henri Brulard (1890)
 * Variant translation: Love has always been the most important business in my life, or rather the only one.

 * The only excuse for God is that He does not exist.
 * As quoted in "A Sentimental Education" by James Huneker, Scribner's Magazine, Vol. 43 (1908), p. 230, also quoted in Albert Camus's The Rebel and Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.

De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)

 * I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
 * Ch. 1

 * The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse — as a luxury befitting a young man.
 * Ch. 1

 * In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.
 * Ch. 1

 * La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur.
 * Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
 * Ch. 17, footnote

 * A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
 * Ch. 60

 * It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.
 * Fragments, sec. 10

 * True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.
 * Fragments, sec. 46

 * On peut tout acquérir dans la solitude, hormis du caractère.
 * One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.
 * Fragments

 * Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
 * Fragments

 * In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
 * Fragments

Armance (1827)

 * Pourquoi ne pas en finir? se dit-il enfin; pourquoi cette obstination à lutter contre le destin qui m'accable? J'ai beau faire les plans de conduite les plus raisonnables en apparence, ma vie n'est qu'une suite de malheurs et de sensations amères. Ce mois-ci ne vaut pas mieux que le mois passé; cette année-ci ne vaut pas mieux que l'autre année; d'où vient cette obstination à vivre? Manquerais-je de fermeté? Qu'est-ce que la mort? se dit-il en ouvrant la caisse de ses pistolets et les considérant. Bien peu de chose en vérité; il faut être fou pour s'en passer.
 * "Why not make an end of it all?" he asked himself. "Why this obstinate resistance to the fate that is crushing me? It is all very well my forming what are apparently the most reasonable forms of conduct, my life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings. This month is no better than the last; this year is no better than last year. Why this obstinate determination to go on living? Can I be wanting in firmness? What is death?" he asked himself, opening his case of pistols and examining them. "A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it."
 * Ch. 2

 * Cette manie des mères de ce siècle, d'être constamment à la chasse au mari.
 * This mania of the mothers of the period, to be constantly in pursuit of a son-in-law.
 * Ch. 5

 * Ce qui est fort beau est nécessairement toujours vrai.
 * What is really beautiful must always be true.
 * Ch. 6

 * Je ne suis plus si content de cette bonne compagnie par excellence, que j'ai tant aimée. Il me semble que sous des mots adroits elle proscrit toute énergie, toute originalité. Si l'on n'est copie, elle vous accuse de mauvaises manières. Et puis la bonne compagnie usurpe. Elle avait autrefois le privilège de juger de ce qui est bien; mais depuis qu'elle se croit attaquée, elle condamne, non plus ce qui est grossier et désagréable sans compensation, mais ce qu'elle croit nuisible à ses intérêts.
 * I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered. And besides, good society usurps its privileges. It had in the past the privilege of judging what was proper, but now that it supposes itself to be attacked, it condemns not what is irredemably coarse and disagreeable, but what it thinks harmful to its interest.
 * Ch. 10

 * Depuis que la machine à vapeur est la reine du monde, un titre est une absurdité, mais enfin, je suis affublé de cette absurdité. Elle m'écrasera si je ne la soutiens. Ce titre attire l'attention sur moi.
 * Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if I do not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.
 * Ch. 14

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

 * Dans notre état, il faut opter; il s'agit de faire fortune dans ce monde ou dans l'autre, il n'y a pas de milieu.
 * In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
 * Vol. I, ch. VIII

 * Quitte-t-on sa maîtresse, on risque, hélas! d'être trompé deux ou trois fois par jour.
 * When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
 * Vol. I, ch. XII

 * Jamais il ne s'était trouvé aussi près de ces terribles instruments de l'artillerie féminine.
 * Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
 * Vol. I, ch. XVI

 * Napoléon était bien l'homme envoyé de Dieu pour les jeunes Français! Qui le remplacera?
 * Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
 * Vol. I, ch. XVII

 * Les vraies passions sont égoïstes.
 * Our true passions are selfish.
 * Vol. I, ch. XXI

 * C'est à coups de mépris public qu'un mari tue sa femme au XIXe siècle; c'est en lui fermant tous les salons.
 * It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors of all the drawing-rooms in her face.
 * Vol. I, ch. XXI

 * Que ne sait-il choisir ses gens? La marche ordinaire du XIXe siècle est que, quand un être puissant et noble rencontre un homme de cœur, il le tue, l'exile, l'emprisonne ou l'humilie tellement, que l'autre a la sottise d'en mourir de douleur.
 * Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.
 * Vol. I, ch. XXIII

 * Étrange effet du mariage, tel que l'a fait le XIXe siècle! L'ennui de la vie matrimoniale fait périr l'amour sûrement, quand l'amour a précédé le mariage. Et cependant, dirait un philosophe, il amène bientôt chez les gens assez riches pour ne pas travailler, l'ennui profond de toutes les jouissances tranquilles. Et ce n'est que les âmes sèches parmi les femmes qu'il ne prédispose pas à l'amour.
 * A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.
 * Vol. I, ch. XXIII

 * Les contemporains qui souffrent de certaines choses ne peuvent s'en souvenir qu'avec une horreur qui paralyse tout autre plaisir, même celui de lire un conte.
 * People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.
 * Vol. I, ch. XXVII

 * Les signes ne peuvent pas figurer, dans un rapport d'espion, aussi avantageusement que des paroles.
 * Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
 * Vol. I, ch. XXVII

 * J.-J. Rousseau, répondit-il, n'est à mes yeux qu'un sot, lorsqu'il s'avise de juger le grand monde; il ne le comprenait pas, et y portait le cœur d'un laquais parvenu... Tout en prêchant la république et le renversement des dignités monarchiques, ce parvenu est ivre de bonheur, si un duc change la direction de sa promenade après dîner, pour accompagner un de ses amis.
 * "Jean Jacques Rousseau," he answered, "is nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends."
 * Vol. II, ch. VIII

 * Tel est le malheur de notre siècle, les plus étranges égarements même ne guérissent pas de l'ennui.
 * This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
 * Vol. II, ch. XVII

 * Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route. Et l’homme qui porte le miroir dans sa hotte sera par vous accusé‚ d’être immoral ! Son miroir montre la fange, et vous accusez le miroir! Accusez bien plutôt le grand chemin où est le bourbier, et plus encore l’inspecteur des routes qui laisse l’eau croupir et le bourbier se former.
 * A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.
 * Vol. II, ch. XIX

 * La politique au milieu des intérêts d'imagination, c'est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un concert. Ce bruit est déchirant sans être énergique. Il ne s'accorde avec le son d'aucun instrument. Cette politique va offenser mortellement une moitié des lecteurs et ennuyer l'autre qui l'a trouvée bien autrement spéciale et énergique dans le journal du matin.
 * Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is loud without being forceful. It isn't in harmony with the sound of any instrument. This political discussion will mortally offend half my readers and bore the others, who have found a much more precise and vigorous account of such matters in their morning newspapers.
 * Vol. II, ch. XXII

 * Les Russes copient les moeurs françaises, mais toujours à cinquante ans de distance.
 * The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
 * Vol. II, ch. XXIV

 * Le dîner fut médiocre et la conversation impatientante C'est la table d'un mauvais livre, pensait Julien. Tous les plus grands sujets des pensées des hommes y sont fièrement abordés. Ecoute-t-on trois minutes, on se demande ce qui l'emporte de l'emphase du parleur ou de son abominable ignorance.
 * The dinner was indifferent and the conversation irritating. "It's like the table of contents of a dull book," thought Julien. "All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayed in it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance."
 * Vol. II, ch. XXVII

 * Il n’y a point de droit naturel: ce mot n'est qu’une antique niaiserie... Avant la loi il n’y a de naturel que la force du lion, ou le besoin de l’être qui a faim, qui a froid, le besoin en un mot.
 * There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.
 * Vol. II, ch. XLIV
 * Variant translation: There is no such thing as natural law, the expression is nothing more than a silly anachronism … There is no such thing as right, except when there is a law to forbid a certain thing under pain of punishment. Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry, to put it in one word, need.
 * As translated by Horace B. Samuel (1916)

Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) (1832)

 * Sans travail, le vaisseau de la vie humaine n'a point de lest.
 * Without work, the vessel of human life has no ballast.
 * Ch. 1

 * Je suis profondément convaincu que le seul antidote qui puisse faire oublier au lecteur les éternels Je que l'auteur va écrire, c'est une parfaite sincérité.
 * I am deeply convinced that the only antidote that can make the reader forget the eternal I's that the author will write is a perfect sincerity.
 * Ch. 1

 * Je devins gai ou plutôt j'acquis l'art de le paraître.
 * I became merry or rather I acquired the art of appearing so.
 * Ch. 2

 * Il a demandé ma dépouille [...]. Il ne m'est pas plus venu dans l'idée de me fâcher ou de moins le vénérer qu'il me vient de blasphémer contre le soleil lorsqu'il se couvre d'un nuage.
 * He wished me dead. It did not occur to me any more to become angry or to venerate him less than it did to blaspheme against the sun when it's covered by a cloud.
 * Ch. 5

 * J'ai oublié de peindre ce salon. Sir Walter Scott, et ses imitateurs, eussent commencé par là, mais moi, j'abhorre la description matérielle. L'ennui de les faire m'empêche de faire des romans.
 * I forgot to illustrate this salon. Sir Walter Scott, and his imitators, would have started with that, but for me, I abhor material description. The trouble of making them prevents me from writing novels.
 * Ch. 5

 * Un jour [elles] demandèrent [à Mme de Montcortin] ce que c'était que l'amour, elle répondit : « C'est une vilaine chose sale, dont on accuse quelquefois les femmes de chambre, et, quand elles en sont convaincues, on les chasse. »
 * One day they asked Mme Montcortin what love is, she answered, "It's a nasty, dirty thing, of which chambermaids are sometimes accused, and, when they're convinced, they are chased."
 * Ch. 5

 * Les hommes de lettres disent : « Dans les pays étrangers, on peut avoir des pensées ingénieuses, on ne sait faire un livre qu'en France. » Oui, si le seul but d'un livre est de faire comprendre une idée, non s'il espère en même temps faire sentir, donner quelque nuance d'émotion.
 * Literary men say, "In foreign countries, one can have ingenious thoughts, but one merely knows how to make a book in France." Yes, if the only goal of a book is to make an idea understood, not if it hopes to also make one feel, give some nuance of emotion.
 * Ch. 5

 * Lussinge se moquait de mon insupportable orgueil quand je lui montrais ma haine [pour M. de Jouy] ; il en concluait que sans doute M. de Jouy ou M. Campenon avait fait une sanglante critique de quelques-uns de mes écrits. Un critique qui s'est moqué de moi m'inspire un tout autre sentiment. Je rejuge, à chaque fois que je relis sa critique, qui a raison de lui ou de moi.
 * Lussinge scoffed at my unbearable pride when I showed him my hatred [for Mr. de Jouy]; he concluded that no doubt Mr. de Jouy or Mr. Capenon had made a bloody critique of some of my writings. A critic that's mocked me inspires an entirely different feeling. I re-evaluate, every time I reread his critique, who is right between me or him.
 * Ch. 7

 * La société étant divisée par bandes comme un bambou, la grande affaire d'un homme est de monter dans la classe supérieure à la sienne, et tout l'effort de cette classe est de l'empêcher de monter.
 * Society being divided in strips like bamboo, the great business of a man is to ascend to the class superior to his own, and all the effort of this class is to prevent him from ascending.
 * Ch. 7

 * La politesse des hautes classes de France, et probablement d'Angleterre, proscrit toute énergie, et l'use, si elle existait par hasard.
 * The politeness of the upper classes of France, and probably of England, prohibits all energy, and wears it out, if it by chance existed.
 * Ch. 7

 * — Mais c'est de l'égotisme abominable que tous ces détails ! — Sans doute, et qu'est ce livre, autre chose qu'un abominable égotisme ! [...]  Si ce livre est ennuyeux, au bout de deux ans il enveloppera le beurre chez l'épicier ; s'il n'ennuie pas, on verra que l'égotisme, mais sincère, est une façon de peindre ce cœur humain dans la connaissance duquel nous avons fait des pas de géant depuis 1721, époque des Lettres persanes de ce grand homme que j'ai tant étudié : Montesquieu.
 * "But all these details are but abominable egotism!" "No doubt, and what is this book, but an abominable egotism!" [...] If this book be boring, in two years it shall wrap butter at the grocer's; if it bore not, one shall see that egotism, but a sincere one, is a way of painting the human heart on the knowledge of which we have made a giant's steps since 1721, time of the Persian Letters of this man I've studied so much—Montesquieu.
 * Ch. 7

 * Comme tomber dans une inconvenance de parole est beaucoup plus funeste à un jeune homme qu'il ne lui est avantageux de dire un joli mot, la postérité, probablement moins niaise, ne se fera pas moins d'idée de l'insipidité de la bonne compagnie.
 * As falling into an impropriety of speech is much more fatal to a young man than it is advantageous to utter a pretty word, posterity, probably less silly, will have no less idea of the insipidity of good company.
 * Ch. 8

 * Il [le jeune pianiste] avait appris à admirer tel morceau, la première qualité était toujours, dans un son, d'être juste, dans une phrase, d'être correcte. À mes yeux, la première qualité, de bien loin, est d'être expressif.
 * He [the young pianist] had learned to admire such piece, the prime quality was always, in a sound, to be in tune, in a phrase, to be flawless. To my eyes, the prime quality, by quite far, is to be expressive.
 * Ch. 8

 * Je soutenais qu'un grand tiers du mérite de sir Walter Scott était dû à un secrétaire qui lui ébauchait les descriptions de paysage en présence de la nature. Je le trouvais comme le je trouve, faible en peinture de passion, en connaissance du cœur humain. La postérité confirmera-t-elle le jugement des contemporains qui place le Baronnet Ultra immédiatement après Shakespeare.
 * I sustained that a great part of Walter Scott's merit was owed to a secretary that drafted the descriptions of landscape in presence of nature. I found him how I find him now, weak in painting passion, in knowledge of the human heart. Posterity will confirm the judgement of contemporaries that places the Baronet Ultra immediately after Shakespeare.
 * Ch. 10

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

 * Tout est noble et délicat (sur le lac de Côme), tout parle d'amour, rien ne rappelle la laideur de la civilisation. Les villages situés à mi-hauteur de la côte sont cachés par les arbres, et au-dessus de la cime des arbres s'élève l'architecture gracieuse de leurs clochers élancés. Si quelque petit champ large de cinquante pas interrompt parfois les « bouquets » de châtaigniers et de cerisiers sauvages, l'œil satisfait voit pousser des plantes plus heureuses et plus vigoureuses qu'ailleurs. Au-delà de ces collines, dont les sommets offrent des ermitages que l'on aimerait tous habiter, l'œil émerveillé découvre les sommets des Alpes, toujours recouverts de neige, et leur sublime austérité lui rappelle les malheurs de la vie, et cela en accroît la volupté. de l'heure présente. L'imagination est émue par le son lointain de la cloche d'un petit village caché sous les arbres ; et les bruits portés par les eaux, qui les adoucissent, prennent une couleur de douce mélancolie et de résignation, et semblent dire à l'homme : La vie s'enfuit, alors ne te montre pas si réticent envers le bonheur qui se présente, dépêche-toi d'en jouir . La langue de ces lieux enchanteurs, qui n'ont pas d'égal dans le monde, a redonné à la comtesse son cœur de seize ans.
 * Everything is noble and delicate (on Lake Como), everything speaks of love, nothing recalls the ugliness of civilization. The villages located halfway up the coast are hidden by trees, and above the tops of the trees rises the graceful architecture of their slender bell towers. If some small field, fifty paces wide, occasionally interrupts the "bouquets" of chestnut and wild cherry trees, the satisfied eye sees plants growing happier and more vigorous than elsewhere. Beyond these hills, whose peaks offer hermitages that we would all like to inhabit, the amazed eye discovers the peaks of the Alps, always covered with snow, and their sublime austerity reminds him of the misfortunes of life, and this increases the voluptuousness. of the present hour. The imagination is moved by the distant sound of the bell of some tiny village hidden under the trees; and the sounds carried on the waters, which soften them, take on a color of sweet melancholy and resignation, and seem to say to man: Life is fleeing, so do not show yourself so reluctant towards the happiness that presents itself, hurry to enjoy. The language of these enchanting places, which have no equal in the world, restored her sixteen-year-old heart to the Countess.
 * Ch. ?

 * La guerre n'était donc plus ce noble et commun élan d'âmes amantes de la gloire qu'il s'était figuré d'après les proclamations de Napoléon!
 * War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.
 * Ch. 3

 * Comme on craint peu de choquer la vanité, on arrive fort vite en Italie au ton de l'intimité, et à dire des choses personnelles.
 * Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
 * Ch. 6

 * A la Scala, il est d'usage de ne faire durer qu'une vingtaine de minutes ces petites visites que l'on fait dans les loges.
 * At La Scala it is customary to take no more than twenty minutes for those little visits one pays to boxes.
 * Ch. 6

 * Le goût de la liberté, la mode et le culte du bonheur du plus grand nombre, dont le XIXe siècle s'est entiché, n'étaient à ses yeux qu'une hérésie qui passera comme les autres.
 * The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority that the nineteenth century is infatuated with, was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.
 * Ch. 7

 * Les plaisirs et les soins de l'ambition la plus heureuse, même du pouvoir sans bornes, ne sont rien auprès du bonheur intime que donnent les relations de tendresse et d'amour. Je suis homme avant d'être prince, et, quand j'ai le bonheur d'aimer, ma maîtresse s'adresse à l'homme et non au prince.
 * The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am a man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.
 * Ch. 7

 * Un être à demi stupide, mais attentif, mais prudent tous les jours, goûte très-souvent le plaisir de triompher des hommes à imagination.
 * A creature who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp look-out, and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of imagination.
 * Ch. 10

 * Cette religion ôte le courage de penser aux choses inaccoutumées, et défend surtout l'examen personnel, comme le plus énorme des péchés; c'est un pas vers le protestantisme.
 * This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins; it is a step towards protestantism.
 * Ch. 12

 * La vanité piquée peut mener loin un jeune homme riche et dès le berceau toujours environné de flatteurs.
 * Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who has been surrounded by flatterers since birth.
 * Ch. 13

 * De loin nous ne nous faisons pas d'idée de ce que c'est que l'autorité d'un despote qui connaît de vue tous ses sujets.
 * At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
 * Ch. 16

 * Quand je devrais acheter cette vie de délices et cette chance unique de bonheur par quelques petits dangers, où serait le mal? Et ne serait-ce pas encore un bonheur que de trouver ainsi une faible occasion de lui donner une preuve de mon amour?
 * Were I to buy this life of pleasure and this only chance at happiness with a few little dangers, where would be the harm? And wouldn’t it still be fortunate to find a weak excuse to give her proof of my love?
 * Ch. 20

 * Une femme de quarante ans n'est plus quelque chose que pour les hommes qui l'ont aimée dans sa jeunesse!
 * A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth!
 * Ch. 23

Quotes about Stendhal

 * We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern consciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble. Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and, despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuation between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject. But, such as he was, he offered himself to the moment; circumstances seized him, tossed him about, and laid upon him a unique and unexpected destiny; they formed him so that he was compelled to come to terms with reality in a way which no one had done before him.
 * Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (2003), p. 454

 * Stendhal's a good novelist, but I think the limitations of Stendhal have been rather disastrous. I think you'd do better with Balzac. If you have to imitate a Frenchman.
 * 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin

 * By way of contrast to the German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica [psychological voluptuousness, or delightful psychology], which is none too distantly related to the tediousness of German company, and as the most consummate expression of a typically French curiosity and inventiveness for this realm of delicate thrills, one may consider Henri Beyle, that remarkable anticipatory and precursory human being who ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as an explorer and discoverer of this soul: it required two generations to catch up with him in any way, to figure out again a few of the riddles that tormented and enchanted him, this odd epicurean and question mark of a man who was France's last great psychologist.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future § 254, as translated by Walter Kaufmann (1966)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Stendhal


text:
Christian Morgenstern

Christian Morgenstern (May 6, 1871 – March 31, 1914) was a German author.

Sourced

 * None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.
 * cited in Zarathustra’s Children (2000), p. 178

 * Weil, so schließt er messerscharf Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.
 * For, he reasons pointedly That which must not, can not be.
 * „Die unmögliche Tatsache” “The Impossible Fact” (1910)

title: Christian Morgenstern


text:
Democritus

 (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He is popularly known as "the laughing philosopher" for advocating a cheerful outlook, and for his rhetorical use of irony and ridicule. A pupil of Leucippus, he was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher who formulated an atomic theory of the universe. Of his voluminous writings, only a few fragments of his ethical theory remain, with descriptions by other writers of his atomic theory.

Quotes

 * δοκεῖ δὲ αὐτῶι τάδε· ἀρχὰς εἶναι τῶν ὅλων ἀτόμους καὶ κενόν, τὰ δ'ἀλλα πάντα νενομίσθαι [δοξάζεσθαι]. (Diogenes Laërtius, Democritus, Vol. IX, 44)
 * Now his principal doctrines were these. That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion. (trans. Yonge 1853)
 * The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. (trans. by Robert Drew Hicks 1925)

 * νόμωι (γάρ φησι) γλυκὺ καὶ νόμωι πικρόν, νόμωι θερμόν, νόμωι ψυχρόν, νόμωι χροιή, ἐτεῆι δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν (Tetralogies of Thrasyllus, 9; Sext. Emp. adv. math. VII 135)
 * Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality. (trans. Freeman 1948), p. 92.
 * By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void. (trans. Durant 1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 353; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment O" (Diels), p. 60

 * We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 142

 * Medicine heals diseases of the body, wisdom frees the soul from passions.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 149
 * Variant: Medicine cures the diseases of the body; wisdom, on the other hand, relieves the soul of its sufferings.

 * Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 150

 * Man is a universe in little [Microcosm].
 * Freeman (1948), p. 150

 * Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 151
 * Variant: Strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man.
 * Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment 57"
 * Variant: In cattle excellence is displayed in strength of body; but in men it lies in strength of character.

 * Πολλοὶ πολυμαθέες νοῦν οὐκ ἔχουσιν.
 * Many much-learned men have no intelligence.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 152 [Democr. "Fragment B 64" ("Demokrates 29" in Stobaeus, Anthologium III, 4, 81)]
 * Variant: There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.

 * Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 152
 * Variant: It is childish, not manly, to have immoderate desires.

 * [I would] rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 155
 * Variant: I would rather discover a single demonstration [in geometry] than become king of the Persians.
 * Durant (1939) ,Ch. XVI, §II, p. 352, citinas G.Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates (London, 1875), vol. 1, p. 68; and citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, p. 62.

 * Men have fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity. For Chance rarely conflicts with intelligence, and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent sharpsightedness.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 155

 * In a shared fish, there are no bones.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 157

 * Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 161

 * Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 161
 * Variant: The good things of life are produced by learning with hard work; the bad are reaped of their own accord, without hard work.

 * The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 162
 * Variant: The needy animal knows how much it needs, but the needy man does not.

 * Moderation multiplies pleasures, and increases pleasure.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 163
 * Variant: Moderation increases enjoyment, and makes pleasure even greater.

 * The brave man is not only he who overcomes the enemy, but he who is stronger than pleasures. Some men are masters of cities, but are enslaved to women.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 163
 * Variant: The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures. There are some men who are masters of cities but slaves to women.

 * It is hard to fight desire; but to control it is the sign of a reasonable man.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 165
 * Variant: It is hard to fight with desire; but to overcome it is the mark of a rational man.

 * The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 166
 * Variant: Envy is the cause of political division.

 * To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 166
 * Variant: To a wise and good man the whole earth is his fatherland.
 * Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 352 (footnote); citing F. Uberweg, History of Philosophy, New York, 1871, vol. 1, p. 71.

 * The man who is fortunate in his choice of son-in-law gains a son; the man unfortunate in his choice loses his daughter also.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 169

 * If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 170
 * Variant: By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich.

 * Disease of the home and of the life comes about in the same way as that of the body.
 * Freeman (1948), p. 170
 * Variant: Disease occurs in a household, or in a life, just as it does in a body.

 * No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.
 * Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing J. Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, London, 1881, vol. 1, p. 149.

 * Strength and beauty are the blessings of youth; temperance, however, is the flower of old age.
 * Fragment quoted in H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds.) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. II (1952), no. 294; reference taken from Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 261

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907)

 * Tr., source

The Fragments

 * the numbering is that of

 * Man should know from this rule that he is cut off from truth.

 * This argument too shows that in truth we know nothing about anything, but every man shares the generally prevailing opinion.

 * And yet it will be obvious that it is difficult to really know of what sort each thing is.

 * Now, that we do not really know of what sort each thing is, or is not, has often been shown.

 * Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep. (Another translation: "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers R.D. Hicks, Ed.)

 * In fact we do not know anything infallibly, but only that which changes according to the condition of our body and of the [influences] that reach and impinge upon it.

 * There are two forms of knowledge, one genuine, one obscure. To the obscure belong all of the following: sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling. The other form is the genuine, and is quite distinct from this. [And then distinguishing the genuine from the obscure, he continues:] Whenever the obscure [way of knowing] has reached the minimum sensibile of hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and when the investigation must be carried farther into that which is still finer, then arises the genuine way of knowing, which has a finer organ of thought.

 * [Democritus says:] By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void. That is, the objects of sense are supposed to be real and it is customary to regard them as such, but in truth they are not. Only the atoms and the void are real.

 * Of practical wisdom these are the three fruits: to deliberate well, to speak to the point, to do what is right.

 * He who intends to enjoy life should not be busy about many things, and in what he does should not undertake what exceeds his natural capacity. On the contrary, he should have himself so in hand that even when fortune comes his way, and is apparently ready to lead him on to higher things, he should put her aside and not o'erreach his powers. For a being of moderate size is safer than one that bulks too big.

The Golden Sayings of Democritus

 * If any one hearken with understanding to these sayings of mine many a deed worthy of a good man shall he perform and many a foolish deed be spared.

 * If one choose the goods of the soul, he chooses the diviner [portion]; if the goods of the body, the merely mortal.

 * 'Tis well to restrain the wicked, and in any case not to join him in his wrong-doing.

 * 'Tis not in strength of body nor in gold that men find happiness, but in uprightness and in fulness of understanding.

 * Not from fear but from a sense of duty refrain from your sins.

 * Repentance for one's evil deeds is the safeguard of life.

 * He who does wrong is more unhappy than he who suffers wrong.

 * 'Tis a grievous thing to be subject to an inferior.

 * Many who have not learned wisdom live wisely, and many who do the basest deeds can make most learned speeches.

 * Fools learn wisdom through misfortune.

 * One should emulate works and deeds of virtue, not arguments about it.

 * Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.

 * The hopes of the right-minded may be realized, those of fools are impossible.

 * Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.

 * It is better to correct your own faults than those of another.

 * Those who have a well-ordered character lead also a well-ordered life.

 * Good means not [merely] not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

 * There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.

 * Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

 * Making money is not without its value, but nothing is baser than to make it by wrong-doing.

 * You can tell the man who rings true from the man who rings false, not by his deeds alone, but also by his desires.

 * False men and shams talk big and do nothing.

 * My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.

 * The enmity of one's kindred is far more bitter than the enmity of strangers.

 * The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.

 * No one deserves to live who has not at least one good-man-and-true for a friend.

 * Seek after the good, and with much toil shall ye find it; the evil turns up of itself without your seeking it.

 * For a man petticoat government is the limit of insolence.

 * (Democritus said he would rather discover a single demonstration than win the throne of Persia.)

 * Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right.

 * In the weightiest matters we must go to school to the animals, and learn spinning and weaving from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the birds,—from the swan and the nightingale, imitating their art.

 * An evil and foolish and intemperate and irreligious life should not be called a bad life, but rather, dying long drawn out.

 * Fortune is lavish with her favors, but not to be depended on. Nature on the other hand is self-sufficing, and therefore with her feebler but trustworthy [resources] she wins the greater [ meed ] of hope.

 * The right-minded man, ever inclined to righteous and lawful deeds, is joyous day and night, and strong, and free from care. But if a man take no heed of the right, and leave undone the things he ought to do, then will the recollection of no one of all his transgressions bring him any joy, but only anxiety and self-reproaching.

 * Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

 * Of all things the worst to teach the young is dalliance, for it is this that is the parent of those pleasures from which wickedness springs.

 * A sensible man takes pleasure in what he has instead of pining for what he has not.

 * A life without a holiday is like a long journey without an inn to rest at.

 * The pleasures that give most joy are the ones that most rarely come.

 * Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.

 * Men in their prayers beg the gods for health, not knowing that this is a thing they have in their own power. Through their incontinence undermining it, they themselves become, because of their passions, the betrayers of their own health.

 * Men achieve tranquillity through moderation in pleasure and through the symmetry of life. Want and superfluity are apt to upset them and to cause great perturbations in the soul. The souls that are rent by violent conflicts are neither stable nor tranquil. One should therefore set his mind upon the things that are within his power, and be content with his opportunities, nor let his memory dwell very long on the envied and admired of men, nor idly sit and dream of them. Rather, he should contemplate the lives of those who suffer hardship, and vividly bring to mind their sufferings, so that your own present situation may appear to you important and to be envied, and so that it may no longer be your portion to suffer torture in your soul by your longing for more. For he who admires those who have, and whom other men deem blest of fortune, and who spends all his time idly dreaming of them, will be forced to be always contriving some new device because of his [insatiable] desire, until he ends by doing some desperate deed forbidden by the laws. And therefore one ought not to desire other men's blessings, and one ought not to envy those who have more, but rather, comparing his life with that of those who fare worse, and laying to heart their sufferings, deem himself blest of fortune in that he lives and fares so much better than they. Holding fast to this saying you will pass your life in greater tranquillity and will avert not a few of the plagues of life—envy and jealousy and bitterness of mind.

 * All who delight in the pleasures of the belly, exceeding all measure in eating and drinking and love, find that the pleasures are brief and last but a short while—only so long as they are eating and drinking—but the pains that come after are many and endure. The longing for the same things keeps ever returning, and whenever the objects of one's desire are realized forthwith the pleasure vanishes, and one has no further use for them. The pleasure is brief, and once more the need for the same things returns.

 * We ought to regard the interests of the state as of far greater moment than all else, in order that they may be administered well; and we ought not to engage in eager rivalry in despite of equity, nor arrogate to ourselves any power contrary to the common welfare. For a state well administered is our greatest safeguard. In this all is summed up: When the state is in a healthy condition all things prosper; when it is corrupt, all things go to ruin.

Quotes about Democritus

 * The Greeks elaborated several theories of vision. According to the Pythagoreans, Democritus, and others vision is caused by the projection of particles from the object seen, into the pupil of the eye. On the other hand Empedocles, the Platonists, and Euclid held the strange doctrine of ocular beams, according to which the eye itself sends out something which causes sight as soon as it meets something else emanated by the object.
 * Florian Cajori, A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches (1899)

 * The atomic theory was not generally accepted in the time of Democritus, largely because of its deterministic character, for it allows no chance, choice, or free will.
 * John Freely, Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012)

 * One thing of course was a fundamental necessity to the atomic world-view. There must be empty space for the atoms to move about in. The hallmark of Democritus’s thought, as Aristotle noted approvingly, was a determination to account for apparent fact and not be led astray by abstract argument. Hence he said that Parmenides’s denial of the existence of void could not be upheld. It was contrary to common sense. Aware however that he was flying in the face of that great authority, he made his denial with a kind of schoolboy daring, for according to Aristotle he put it in the form: ‘What is not does exist, no less than what is.’ If material atoms were the only real substance, then empty space was not real in the same sense. Dimly aware that there must be some way out, the atomists did not yet command a language capable of such a phrase as ‘not in the same sense’, and paradox was their only resource.
 * W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: from Thales to Aristotle (1950), Chap. 3 : The problem of motion (Heraclitus, Parmenides and the pluralists)

 * Eudoxes... not only based the method [of exhaustion] on rigorous demonstration... but he actually applied the method to find the volumes (1) of any pyramid, (2) of the cone, proving (1) that any pyramid is one third part of the prism which has the same base and equal height, and (2) that any cone is one third part of the cylinder which has the same base and equal height. Archimedes, however, tells us the remarkable fact that these two theorems were first discovered by Democritus, though he was not able to prove them (which no doubt means, not that he gave no sort of proof, but that he was not able to establish the propositions by the rigorous methods of Eudoxes. Archimedes adds that we must give no small share of the credit for these theorems to Democritus... another testimony to the marvellous powers, in mathematics as well as in other subjects, of the great man who, in the words of Aristotle, "seems to have thought of everything". ...Democritus wrote on irrationals; he is also said to have discussed the question of two parallel sections of a cone (which were evidently supposed to be indefinitely close together), asking whether we are to regard them as equal or unequal... Democritus was already close on the track of infinitesimals.
 * Sir Thomas Little Heath, Archimedes (1920) pp.20-21

title: Democritus


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Talk:Penny Arcade

The Penny Arcade website has been changed significantly within the past few days (as of this writing), and as such, the links on this page must be updated to correlate with the new dating format in the archive.

--Ihmhi 18:55, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

 * Fixed. But while checking the links to make sure they were right, the link for the comic about the interview about them being horrible human beings (link #11 right now) was wrong. I couldn't find the correct source comic, so I pointed the link to the main page for the time being. — Filthychimp 08:00, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

- 14:12, 24 November 2005 (CST) fixed link #12

title: Talk:Penny Arcade


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User talk:Ihmhi

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 19:22, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Ihmhi