'a few barren and lifeless truths'

I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries . . .

—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759, second edition)

A Vatican Heist

There once were two goats and one Christ
Who plotted a Vatican heist
They let down a rope
To pull up the Pope
But a bishop would have to suffice.

—Matt Izzi, Correspondence (2014)

Socialism and Christianity

Sometimes socialism manifests a pretention of realizing the Christian morals. In this connection, someone made the well-known jest that there is but one slight difference between Christianity and socialism, which is that Christianity urges one to give away what is one's own, while socialism urges one to take what belongs to others.

—Vladimir Soloviev, Lectures on Godmanhood (1878)

'being content with the spectacle of the world'

In Saramago's novels, the self may cast only a shadow, like Ricardo Reis, but this shadow implies not the nonexistence of the self, but only its difficult visibility, its near invisibility, rather as the shadow cast by the sun warns us that we cannot look directly at it. Ricardo Reis is aloof, ghostly. He does not want to get pulled into real relationships, including the real relationships of politics. Europe is scrambling for war, but Ricardo luxuriously sits around wondering if he exists. He writes a poem that begins "We count for nothing, we are less than futile." Another poem begins: "Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world." Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world's spectacle is horrifying.

—James Wood, How Fiction Works (2012)

'the enunciation of the rabbis'

Mother, Rabbi Warshaw is a fat, pompous, impatient fraud, with an absolutely grotesque superiority complex, a character out of Dickens is what he is, someone who if you stood next to him on the bus and didn't know he was so revered, you would say, "That man stinks to high heaven of cigarettes," and that is all you would say. This is a man who somewhere along the line got the idea that the basic unit of meaning in the English language is the syllable. So no word he pronounces has less than three of them, not even the word God. You should hear the song and dance he makes out of Israel. For him it's as long as refrigerator! And do you remember him at my bar mitzvah, what a field day he had with Alexander Portnoy? Why, Mother, did he keep calling me by my whole name? Why, except to impress all you idiots in the audience with those syllables! And it worked! It actually worked! . . . "I-a wan-tt to-a wel-come-a you-ew tooo thee sy-no-gawg-a." Oh God, oh Guh-ah-duh, if you're up there shining down your countenance, why not spare us from here on out the enunciation of the rabbis! Why not spare us the rabbis themselves! Look, why not spare us religion, if only in the name of our human dignity!

—Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

I know nothing of life but despair

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;--it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

--Erich Maria Remarque (trans. A.W. Wheen), All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) 

This Body of Mine

By what rule or manner can I bind this body of mine?...He is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my opponent, a protector and a traitor. I am kind to him and he assaults me. If I wear him out he gets weak. If he has rest he becomes unruly. If I upset him he cannot stand it. If I mortify him I endanger myself. If I strike him down I have nothing left by which to acquire virtues. I embrace him. And I turn away from him. What is this mystery in me? What is the principle of this mixed nature of body and soul? How can I be my own friend and my own enemy?

—John Climacus, "On Chastity" in The Ladder of Divine Ascent (600)

'to think is to forget'

He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift relates that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world. . . .

With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

—Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, the Memorious" (The Paris Review, trans. James E. Irby 1962)

'as if his mind were an island in time'

His blindlike blue-looking eyes closed; he tilted back his head so that the stocking-foot dangled like a Chinese pigtail, sighed and said: "Ain't got no time left for to joke, cat." And then, holding the sword to his chest: "Mister Skully gimme this my weddin day; me and my woman, us just jumped over a broom, and Mister Skully, he say, 'All right now, Jesus, you is married.' Travelin Preacher come tell me and my woman that ain't proper, say the Lawd ain't gonna put up with it: sure enough, the cat done killed Toby, and my woman grieves herself so she hangs on a tree, big cozy lady got the branch bent double: back when I was just so high my daddy cut his switches offen that tree . . ." remembering, it was as if his mind were an island in time, the past surrounding sea.

—Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it

These were the map carvings of professional statesmen. Among private people who did not know Schleswig-Holstein from Bohemia, a deep underlying recognition had grown by the time the war was twenty days old that the world was engaged by "the largest human fact since the French Revolution." Though a tremendous catastrophe, it seemed, in August when it was still new, to contain that "enormous hope," the hope of something better afterward, the hope of an end to war, of a chance to remake the world. Mr. Britling in Wells' novel, who, though fictional was representative, thought it might prove a "huge step forward in human life. It is the end of forty years of evil suspense. It is crisis and solution." He saw "a tremendous opportunity...We can remake the map of the world...The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it. This is the end and the beginning of an age..."

--Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962)