Ten quotations from my scrapbook

Wyclif's Dust

I’ve been away for a while. While I write something more serious, here’s a snack: ten passages that struck me while reading, with no particular theme.

Voylà pourquoy, en cette incertitude et perplexité que nous aporte l'impuissance de voir et choisir ce qui est le plus commode, pour les difficultez que les divers accidens et circonstances de chaque chose tirent, le plus seur, quand autre consideration ne nous y convieroit, est, à mon advis, de se rejetter au parti où il y a plus d'honnesteté et de justice; et puis qu'on est en doute du plus court chemin, tenir tousjours le droit…

That’s why, in this uncertainty and puzzlement, caused by our inability to see and choose the most useful way through the difficulties posed by each situation’s various accidents and circumstances, the surest path, when no other consideration occurs to us, is in my opinion to take the side where there is most honour and justice; and since one is unsure of the shortest way, to stick to the straightest.

Montaigne Essays I.24

And:

In life the only wise course is to follow the course of duty and not of interest. Every man knows what his duty is. But it is not given to many to know their true interest.

Churchill

---

In considering successful changes of institutions, persuasion should not, as is so often the case, be contrasted with force. Persuasion is but a means for procuring force. No one has ever persuaded all the members of a society without exception; to ensure success only a section of the individuals in a society need to be persuaded: the section which has the force, either because it is the most numerous or for some quite different reason.

It is by force that social institutions are established, and it is by force that they are maintained.

Pareto

---

It is wonderful how this class of people agree with one another; how they herd together in all their opinions; what a tact they have for folly; what an instinct for absurdity; what a sympathy in sentiment; how they find one another out by infallible signs, like Freemasons! The secret of this unanimity and strict accord is, that not any one of them ever admits any opinion that can cost the least effort of mind in arriving at, or of courage in declaring it.

Hazlitt

---

Up to that day I had been a reader of books, magazines, and newspapers. I had often felt that what I was reading was a deadly poison. All it evoked within me was bitterness, fear, and a feeling of helplessness. Everything that I read followed the same theme—the world was and will always be ruled by might and falsehood, and there was nothing to be done about it. Modern literature used different words to say the same thing: “We live in a slaughterhouse and a house of shame. That's how it was and that's how it's going to be forever.” Suddenly I heard myself reciting words filled with holy optimism. Instead of starting the day with tales of theft and murder, lust and rape, obscenity and revenge, I had started the day with words about justice, sanctity, a God who had granted men understanding and who will revive the dead and reward the just. I had discovered that I didn't have to start the day by swallowing venom.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent

---

There is another offence unto Charity, which no Author hath ever written of, and few take notice of; and that's the reproach, not of whole professions, mysteries, and conditions, but of whole Nations, wherein by opprobrious Epithets we miscall each other, and by an uncharitable Logick, from a disposition in a few, conclude a habit in all.

Le mutin Anglois, et le bravache Escossois, Et le fol François,
Le poultron Romain, le larron de Gascongne,
L'Espagnol superbe, et l'Aleman yvrongne.

Thomas Browne on national prejudice

---

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C. S. Lewis on temporal parochialism

---

For the idea, in whose domain all knowledge lies and to which all knowledge therefore refers, is only the outer side of existence, something secondary, supplementary, something, that is, which was necessary not for the preservation of things as such, the universal totality, but merely for the preservation of the individual animal being. Consequently the existence of things as a whole entered into the realm of knowledge only per accidens, thus to a very limited extent: it forms only the background of the painting in the animal consciousness, where the objectives of the will are the essential element and occupy the front rank. There then arose through this accidens the entire world of space and time, i.e. the world as idea, which possesses no existence of this sort at all outside the realm of knowledge. Now since knowledge exists only for the purpose of preserving each animal individual, its whole constitution, all its forms, such as time, space, etc., are adapted merely to the aims of such an individual: and these require knowledge only of relations between individual phenomena and by no means knowledge of the essential nature of things and the universal totality.

Schopenhauer, anticipating an evolutionary argument about epistemology

---

Most of the ancient peoples lived in governments that had virtue for their principle, and when that virtue was in full force, things were done in those governments that we no longer see and that astonish our small souls.

Their education had another advantage over ours; it was never contradicted. In the last year of his life, Epaminondas said, heard, saw, and did the same things as at the time that he was first instructed.

Today we receive three different or opposing educations: that of our fathers, that of our schoolmasters, and that of the world. What we are told by the last upsets all the ideas of the first two. This comes partly from the opposition there is for us between the ties of religion and those of the world, a thing unknown among the ancients.

Montesquieu on small versus great societies

---

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

Because some are in the darkness
And the others are in the light
And the ones in light, you see them
And the rest are out of sight

Brecht, added final verse to Mackie Messer

Thanks for reading Wyclif's Dust! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

---

If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.

I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.