A garrulous barber asked the Macedonian king Archelaus, “How shall I cut your hair?”
He answered, “In silence.”
(From Plutarch.)
Oh
Society
Second Thoughts
On the Bench his lips would often be seen to move, but no sound proceeding from them would be heard by the Bar. The associate sitting beneath him could tell another tale. … ‘What a damned fool that man is!’ — then, after an interval, ‘Eh, not such a damned fool as I thought;’ then another interval. ‘Egad, it is I that was the damned fool.’
— J.B. Atlay on Lord Lyndhurst, in The Victorian Chancellors, 1906
“A Waste of Time”
A little boy spent his first day at school. ‘What did you learn?’ was his aunt’s question. ‘Didn’t learn nothing.’ ‘Well, what did you do?’ ‘Didn’t do nothing. There was a woman wanting to know how to spell “cat,” and I told her.’
— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899
The 12-year-old Winston Churchill found examinations “a great trial”: “I would have liked to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. … I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know.”
Unquote
“The other day we had a long discourse with [Lady Orkney] about love; and she told us a saying … which I thought excellent, that in men, desire begets love, and in women, love begets desire.” — Jonathan Swift, A Journal to Stella, Oct. 30, 1712
Queries
Questions put by Benjamin Franklin to his Junto, a club for mutual improvement that he founded in Philadelphia in 1727:
- How shall we judge of the goodness of a writing? Or what qualities should a writing have to be good and perfect in its kind? (His own answer: “It should be smooth, clear, and short.”)
- Can a man arrive at perfection in this life, as some believe; or is it impossible, as others believe?
- Wherein consists the happiness of a rational creature?
- What is wisdom? (“The knowledge of what will be best for us on all occasions, and the best ways of attaining it.”)
- Is any man wise at all times and in all things? (“No, but some are more frequently wise than others.”)
- Whether those meats and drinks are not the best that contain nothing in their natural taste, nor have anything added by art, so pleasing as to induce us to eat or drink when we are not thirsty or hungry, or after thirst and hunger are satisfied; water, for instance, for drink, and bread or the like for meat?
- Is there any difference between knowledge and prudence? If there is any, which of the two is most eligible?
- Is it justifiable to put private men to death, for the sake of public safety or tranquillity, who have committed no crime? As, in the case of the plague, to stop infection; or as in the case of the Welshmen here executed?
- If the sovereign power attempts to deprive a subject of his right (or, which is the same thing, of what he thinks his right), is it justifiable in him to resist, if he is able?
- Which is best: to make a friend of a wise and good man that is poor or of a rich man that is neither wise nor good?
- Does it not, in a general way, require great study and intense application for a poor man to become rich and powerful, if he would do it without the forfeiture of honesty?
- Does it not require as much pains, study, and application to become truly wise and strictly virtuous as to become rich?
- Whence comes the dew that stands on the outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in the summer time?
From Carl Van Doren’s biography. “New members had to stand up with their hands on their breasts and say they loved mankind in general and truth for truth’s sake. … In time the Junto had so many applications for membership it was at a loss to know how to limit itself to the twelve originally planned.”
Points of Pride
She’s the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring
That drives the rod that turns the knob that works the thingumebob,
And it’s the girl that makes the thing that holds that oil that oils the ring
That works the thingumebob THAT’S GOING TO WIN THE WAR!
“I’ve Danced With a Man, Who’s Danced With a Girl, Who’s Danced With the Prince of Wales”
Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist. ‘There,’ people of wide experience would say, ‘There goes the sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.’
— G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904
Nobility
English essayist Henry W. Nevinson defined chivalry as “going about releasing beautiful maidens from other men’s castles, and taking them to your own castle.”
In a Word
trusatile
adj. that may be pushed; worked or driven by pushing
Two Solutions
[O]ur self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus,
Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890
Suggestion
As to your method of work, I have a single bit of advice, which I give with the earnest conviction of its paramount influence in any success which may have attended my efforts in life — Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition. That was a singular but very wise answer which Cromwell gave to Bellevire — ‘No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going,’ and there is much truth in it. The student who is worrying about his future, anxious over the examinations, doubting his fitness for the profession, is certain not to do so well as the man who cares for nothing but the matter in hand, and who knows not whither he is going!
— William Osler, advice to students, McGill College, 1899