by Mardy Grothe
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff
and building your wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY
Prejudice is the psoriasis of the human condition:
it’s unsightly and it never completely vanishes,
but with a little care we can keep it under control.
RICK BAYAN
Every person’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures
or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of that person.
SAMUEL BUTLER
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom,
then the emotions…are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
RACHEL CARSON
No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly;
and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas,
any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Alcohol is like love: the first kiss is magic,
the second is intimate, the third is routine.
After that you just take the girl’s clothes off.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough,
as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.
LORD CHESTERFIELD (Philip Dormer Stanhope)
We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Men deal with life as children with their play,
Who first misuse, then cast their toys away.
WILLIAM COWPER
There are some people who leave impressions
not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
KATE CHOPIN
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.
It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body.
It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship,
which illumine only the track it has passed.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
In a related observation, W. R. Inge wrote, “Experience is a good teacher, but her fees are very high.”
Common men pass treasures by;
they respond to the spectacle of nature
as guests at a banquet who are neither hungry nor thirsty.
EUGÈNE DELACROIX
What is man, when you come to think upon him,
but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning,
with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
ISAK DINESEN (Karen Blixen)
Along the same lines, Christopher Morley once penned this thought: “A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.”
Trying to predict the future is like
trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights
while looking out the back window.
PETER DRUCKER
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us
which would have to be taken into account
in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
GEORGE ELIOT
This comes from Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Blaise Pascal communicated the same notion more than two centuries earlier when he wrote, “The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of.” The point of both observations is that the motivation behind much of our behavior—especially our occasional outbursts and eruptions—is beyond our conscious awareness.
There are men too superior to be seen except by the few,
as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Also writing about great men (and women), Kahlil Gibran wrote, “The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reach us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.”
The fundamental principle of human action—
the law that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics—
is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.
HENRY GEORGE
God has placed in each soul an apostle to lead us upon the illumined path.
Yet many seek life from without, unaware that is within them.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling
for the strength of their argument.
The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.
WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE
A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired,
but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.
JOSEPH HALL
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives,
and create a monster they call Destiny.
JOHN OLIVER HOBBES (pen name of Pearl Richards Craigie)
There are thoughts which are prayers.
There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body,
the soul is on its knees.
VICTOR HUGO
The richest genius, like the most fertile soil,
when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.
DAVID HUME
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
To a person uninstructed in natural history,
his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery
filled with wonderful works of art,
nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
THOMAS H. HUXLEY
Viewing nature as an art gallery with ninety percent of the paintings turned to the wall starkly describes the average person’s ignorance of the natural world.
The chess-board is the world;
the pieces are the phenomena of the universe;
the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us.
We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient.
But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake,
or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
THOMAS H. HUXLEY
A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue
is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
WASHINGTON IRVING
Most people live…in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make very small use of their possible consciousness,
and of their soul’s resources in general,
much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism,
should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
WILLIAM JAMES
A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning
is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object,
takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Your morals are like roads through the Alps.
They make these hairpin turns all the time.
ERICA JONG
There is always some frivolity in excellent minds;
they have wings to rise, but also stray.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Great talents are the most lovely
and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity.
They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
CARL JUNG
Trying to help an oppressed person
is like trying to put your arm around somebody with a sunburn.
FLORYNCE KENNEDY
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life lik
e schoolboys;
they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book
without having worked out the sum for themselves.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty
and harmony in life’s relationships,
just as the cold of winter produces ice flowers on the window panes,
which vanish with the warmth.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
In another memorable window pane metaphor, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote: “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book,
printed in the language of equations,
whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink,
of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
STANISLAW LEC
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
STANISLAW LEC
This world is a great sculptor’s shop.
We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop
that some of us are some day going to come to life.
C. S. LEWIS
For happiness one needs security,
but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind,
she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains,
are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul.
NORMAN MAILER
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul
that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
HORACE MANN
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but according to Mann, ignorance loves them. Also thinking about the monsters bred by ignorance, Goethe wrote, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
MARY MCCARTHY
The human mind treats a new idea the same way
the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
PETER B. MEDAWAR
The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.
JOHN MILTON
This comes from Paradise Regained (1671). The basic notion is that early indicators are great predictors of what is to come. William Wordsworth made the same point in a famous line in his 1807 poem “My Heart Leaps Up”: “The child is father of the man.”
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot,
into which each culture, each system of science and religion,
each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived
from the shape and color of the blot itself.
LEWIS MUMFORD
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them
and cover them up, at least a little bit.
EDWARD R. MURROW
The naked truth, a metaphor for plain and unadorned truth, originated in an ancient Roman fable. Truth and Falsehood went for a swim. Falsehood emerged from the water first, dressed in Truth’s clothes, and departed. Truth refused to wear the clothing Falsehood had left behind, preferring to go naked instead. The expression has been used countless times by writers, ancient and modern, but one of my favorites comes from Ann Landers, who wrote, “The naked truth is better than the best-dressed lie.”
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.
ANAÏS NIN
Nin is also widely quoted as saying, “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
There are people who so arrange their lives
that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
Living is like working out one long addition sum,
and if you make a mistake in the first two totals
you will never find the right answer.
CESARE PAVESE
He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth,
like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
JOHN RAY
In other words, lengthy explanations are often a smoke screen that people hide behind. This observation from Ray, a seventeenth-century English naturalist with a great fondness for proverbs, may have inspired one of George Orwell’s best-known lines: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
The world is…a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions
of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of
comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by
some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text.
The world is one of these books.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
In the country of pain we are each alone.
MAY SARTON
The point is that we can never truly understand the pain of another person. On the same subject, William Cullen Bryant wrote, “Pain dies quickly, and lets her weary prisoners go; the fiercest agonies have shortest reign.” And on pain’s brief reign, Katherine Mansfield wrote, “As in the physical world, so in the spiritual world, pain does not last forever.”
We are not unlike a particularly hardy crustacean….
With each passage from one stage of human growth to the next
we, too, must shed a protective structure.
We are left exposed and vulnerable—but also yeasty and embryonic again,
capable of stretching in ways we hadn’t known before.
GAIL SHEEHY, on human beings & lobsters
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
B. F. SKINNER
To suppose, as we all suppose,
that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave,
is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies,
and to their exquisite nonsense, like a drunkard to his bottle,
and go on until death stares them in the face.
SYDNEY SMITH
Smith, an English clergyman in the early nineteenth century, was a popular essayist and lecturer. He inspired the phrase “You can’t put a square peg in a round hole” in an extended metaphorical passage that may be found at www.metaphoramor.com.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night
is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
JOHN STEINBECK
It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles:
the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.
JONATHAN SWIFT
This was likely based on a famous analogy from Plato: “As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness,
yet, perhaps, as few know their own strength.
It is in men as
in soils, where sometimes
there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
JONATHAN SWIFT
As the internal-combustion engine runs on gasoline,
so the person runs on self-esteem:
if he is full of it, he is good for the long run;
if he is partly filled, he will soon need to be refueled;
and if he is empty, he will come to a stop.
THOMAS SZASZ
The world is a looking-glass
and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
This is from Vanity Fair (1847–48). The passage continues: “Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.”
For every ten people who are clipping at the branches of evil,
you’re lucky to find one who’s hacking at the roots.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Everyone is a moon,
and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
MARK TWAIN
This is from Following the Equator (1897). More recently, Faith Baldwin wrote: “We, too, the children of the earth, have our moon phases all through any year; the darkness, the delivery from darkness, the waxing and waning.”
One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul
and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney
and continue on the way.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
A flaw in the human character
is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
E. B. WHITE
Marshall McLuhan said similarly, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” And earlier, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “The most important thing about Spacecraft Earth—an instruction book didn’t come with it.”
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse.
I only owe it to the horse’s good nature
that I am not thrown off at this very moment.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
chapter 3
Humor Is the Shock Absorber of Life
