Jerry Harkins
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
There is no sense worrying about what might happen tomorrow.
Matthew 6:33-34, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” This is part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has just said that a man cannot serve two masters—i.e., God and Money. So serve God and don’t worry about anything else, including tomorrow. God will provide as he does for the lilies of the field.
Percy B. Shelley started to write a poem called “Sufficient Unto The Day” but only this fragment survives (see “Relics of Shelley,” Richard Garnett (ed.), London, : Edward Moxon & Co., 1862.)
Is not to-day enough? Why do I peer
Into the darkness of the day to come?
Is not to-morrow even as yesterday?
And will the day that follows change thy doom?
Few flowers grow upon thy wintry way;
And who waits for thee in that cheerless home
Whence thou hast fled, whither thou must return
Charged with the load that makes thee faint and mourn?
Incidentally, this is not good advice. It is obviously better to prevent evil than to deal with it when it appears.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.
Necessity is the mother of value. On August 22, 1485, at the battle of Bosworth Field, Henry Tudor defeated Richard III thereby becoming Henry VII. At the climactic moment, Richard is unhorsed. He continues to fight on foot, killing five knights he thinks are Richmond. In Shakespeare’s version of the event, he says,
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die:
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.
Richard III V:4
Enter the real Richmond. They duel offstage and Richard is killed.
The great Lionel Barrymore was playing the role one night and, at this line, someone in the audience, thinking it was funny, laughed. Barrymore, never skipping a beat, ad libbed in perfect iambic pentameter, “Make haste and saddle yonder braying ass.”
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
A perfect dilemma. Contradictory but mandatory instructions, rules, laws, etc. Captain Rosarian wants to stop flying dangerous missions after having completed so many that he fears the odds are catching up with him. The original Catch-22 goes like this:
• One may be excused from flying bombing missions only on the grounds of insanity.
• One must assert one's insanity to be excused on this basis.
• But one who requests to be excused is presumably in fear for his life.
• This is taken to be proof of his sanity, and he is therefore obliged to continue flying missions.
One who is truly insane presumably would not make the request. He therefore would continue flying missions, even though as an insane person he could of course be excused from them simply by asking.
Up the Down Staircase
Bel Kaufman
The title of her 1965 fictionalized memoir of a year spent teaching English in a New York City high school. An Assistant Principal is always catching her going up the down staircase and writing her nasty memos about it. She thinks staircases go both ways. When a student called her “Teach,” she called the student, “Pupe.” (Ms. Kaufman is the granddaughter of Sholom Aleichem whose birthday was May 12A because he was superstitious about the number 13.)
Time and the River Flowing
The ineffable grandeur of solitude in wild spaces. Used as the title of the Sierra Club book by Francois Leydet that is often credited with saving the Grand Canyon from the dam builders. Sometimes attributed to Henry David Thoreau, it is actually the creation of Edith Warner who wrote:
This is a day when life and the world seem to be standing still -- only time and the river flowing past the mesas. I cannot work. I go out in the sunshine to sit receptively for what there is in this stillness and calm. I am keenly aware that there is something. Just now it seemed to flow in a rhythm around me and then to enter me -- something which comes in a hushed inflowing. All of me is still and yet alert, ready to become part of this wave that laps the shore on which I sit.
Edith Warner (1893–1951), who lived by the Rio Grande at the Otowi Switch in northern New Mexico, has become a legendary figure owing largely to her portrayal in two books: The Woman at Otowi Crossing, by Frank Waters, and The House at Otowi Bridge, by Peggy Pond Church. Because Edith was famous for her tearoom, where she entertained scientists from the Manhattan Project, few people realize that she was also a serious writer. In the Shadow of Los Alamos, edited by Patrick Burns, is the first publication of her own writings including part of an autobiography. Also included are letters, essays published and unpublished, and journal entries (salvaged by various friends from the original, which was burned after Warner’s death at her request). The editor provides a useful introduction outlining her life and setting it in local and historical context, along with a wonderful collection of period photographs and a facsimile of Edith’s famous chocolate cake recipe.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
“Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray
I have always liked Gray’s Elegy the point of which—that differences between people are unimportant—is expressed in many memorable lines.
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp else what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”
Anticipation is often more satisfying than achievement because at that stage the pleasure is in the imagination. Only heaven is sure to be better than its anticipation. As St. Paul says, “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then shall we know as we are known.”
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Lines 49-50)
The game is or is not worth the candle.
I’ve always been a bit confused by this line. The conventional interpretation, of course, holds that it is the ultimate expression of romantic philosophy. Coleridge said that poetry is opposed to science in that it seeks pleasure, not truth, the beautiful rather than the good. This is, of course, unadulterated high romanticism, sharply at odds with the dominant Aristotelian strain in Western philosophy. Along comes Keats who equates truth and beauty, ignoring pleasure and the good. The line in question is the message of the Urn to its viewers. Its scene depicts something true and beautiful but also something that is only art. It does not exist in the real world. He tells the lover chasing the lady:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
If I were the lover, I’m not sure I’d think this was a good deal.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
The world would survive if it were entirely natural and could not survive if it were entirely artificial. Thus, it is its measure of wildness that preserves it and, thus, the preservation of a measure of wildness is essential.
From “Walking,” a lecture he first gave in 1851 and which was published posthumously in 1862. From Part II, the eighteenth paragraph which begins, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Thoreau was, of course, a great walker. In his diary, he wrote, “I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day." He also famously said, “I have traveled widely in Concord.”
Used as the title of another one of the Sierra Club Exhibit Format Books (1962) which juxtaposed quotes from Thoreau with the beautiful color photography of Eliot Porter.
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf...We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well and good, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
Aldo Leopold.
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, you know what Thoreau really said was that in wildness is the preservation of the world.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:12
The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine.
This is one of those ancient quotes that has been cited so often that its origin is hard to pin down. Plutarch attributes it to Sextus Empiricus in his Adversus Grammaticos (Against The Logicians). Sextus was a third century stoic philosopher who seems to have grown up in Alexandria and who wrote in Greek. The American conservative historian Charles A. Beard wrote:
All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
The German satirist Baron Friedrich of Logau. (1604–1655) wrote the quatrain Sinngedicht (Retribution) which was translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
From the first chapter “Economy” of Walden (1854) in which he makes the point that it is the individual not the mass of men or the community that should be the standard of worthiness. Thoreau was also completely convinced that each one of us could live completely satisfying lives if we only had the courage to do it. Here is the quote in context:
“The government of itself never furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way.
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.
When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one Man?
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
A lot of this is libertarian nonsense but there is an element of truth in the last line. For the mass of men, quiet desperation is the result of elitists who believe in the preceding four aphorisms.
I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, I will to make all things well and I shall make all things well, and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of things shall be well.
Dame Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1417)
Showings (also, Revelation of Divine Love), This is from Showing 13, Chapter 31. Dame Julian’s memoirs of the visions she experienced during a serious illness, probably Bubonic Plague, is the first book written by a woman in modern English. She understood I may to refer to the Father, I can to the Son and I will to to the Holy Spirit.
When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Abraham Maslow, 1966
He actually wrote, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” (The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, Chapter 2). My favorite version is: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.
—Hon. John M. Woolsey, United States of America v. One Book called “Ulysses,” U.S. District Court , Southern District of New York, December 6, 1933.
Well, yes, I suppose. June 16, 1904 to be precise. The new male or “womanly man” Leopold Bloom takes a long walk and has an intense orgasm imagining looking up the skirt of a young girl with a gimp leg. Not, however, as intense as that of his wife, the “manly woman” Molly which lasts 43 pages. Celtic sexuality may be beyond the reach of someone named Woolsey.
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony
—The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1
Lorenzo and Jessica are at Belmont awaiting the return of Portia. They are discoursing somewhat acerbically about the moon. “On such a night as this” unrequited or frustrated love occurred. Lorenzo is in a more romantic mood and orders up some music from the servants. Jessica says “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” Lorenzo says she thinks too much. “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; / The motions of his spirit are dull as night, / And his affections dark as Erebus: / Let no such man be trusted.”
Bless the poor,
Bless the sick,
Bless the whole human race.
Bless our food,
Bless our drink,
And all our families
Please embrace.
Amen.
The grace of Saint Brigid of Kildare.
God writes straight with crooked lines.
Attributed variously to St. Augustine, Thomas Merton and others. Used by Paul Claudel as an epigram for his play “The Satin Slipper” (1931). It is certainly an old Portuguese proverb, “Deus escreve direito por linhas tortas.” Claudel followed it with “Etiam pecata,” which he attributed to St. Augustine. Thus, the whole epigram translates, “God writes straight with crooked lines. Even sins.” Presumably he was trying to say the even sins are put to use by God.
Generally used in the sense that we can’t always understand why things happen or are allowed to happen. A somewhat more favorable (to God) version is the famous remark of Albert Einstein, “God is subtle but not malicious.”
O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.
Said to be the prayer of a Breton fisherman. Admiral Rickover gave a plaque with the prayer to all new submarine captains. He also gave one to John F. Kennedy who quoted it at the dedication of the East Coast Memorial to the Missing at Sea.
This too shall pass
Like many good lines, this one is hard to track down. Pete Seeger used it to introduce "Seek and You Shall Find" on Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs (Columbia Records, CS 9505). The title of the song is from Matthew 7:7-8, “"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” The shall pass line sounds biblical but it is not. Pete got it from his father, the noted musicologist Charles Seeger. It had been used by Abraham Lincoln in a speech he gave in Milwaukee in 1859 and the line appears by itself in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1860 novel, The Marble Faun. There are a number of folk tales from different parts of the world that end with the same sentiment. As a child, I remember being told that when Caesar paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome, a slave rode with him in the chariot repeatedly whispering in his ear Etiam transebit! This too shall pass! It made an impression and, if true, it is certainly the source. But sadly I have never found it in writing.
This line can be optimistic or pessimistic depending on what it is that will pass. But the underlying emotion is resignation that nothing is permanent. In this it is like the remarkable lament of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3:20, “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” And later, in 5:15, he tells us, “As he came forth of his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labour, which he may carry away in his hand.” The latter line resonates with the resignation of Job 1:21, “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Time is short and the river is rising.
I have no idea where this came from but I love it. It is much more subtle than might appear on first reading. Obviously it means that the river is reaching flood stage and
immediate action is essential. There is also the implication that the appropriate authorities are lacking a sense of urgency. Finally, since there is nothing subtle about a rising river, there is the hint that said authorities are stupid.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and miseries.
Shakespeare’s metaphors are often opaque but this one, from Julius Caesar (Act IV, Scene 3, Line 217 ff.), is just plain ignorant. When the tide is at flood stage, it is too late to do much but run for the hills. A couple of lines later, Brutus explains to Cassius that the enemy’s strength is still growing while ours is at its peak. We need to strike while the iron is hot because after the peak comes decline. But ships almost always sail on the outgoing tide.
For all its problems, this is a favorite because it may be the most famous incorrect metaphor in English.
Man is the only animal that can laugh and cry because he is the only animal that can see the difference between things as they are and things as they ought to be.
At one time, possibly because of Darwin, there was great scholarly interest in the difference between mankind and other animals. An English author using the pen name Philalethes, for example, reviewed fourteen proposed differences: thought and its expression in language, language itself, the power of abstraction, anatomy, vertical orientation, the affective characters, the expression of emotions, self-consciousness, perfectability, the moral sense, the powers of memory and will, the sense of religion, the possession of a soul, and the belief in immortality. He found all such formulations wanting and concluded that, “…there is no such point of distinction” and that both man and animals are inextricably linked to each other and to the inorganic world. (“The Distinction between Man and Animals,” Anthropological Review, August, 1864, pp. 153-163.)
I first heard this quote when I was in college. It is derived from a remark of the British essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) who wrote, “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” (“On Wit and Humour” in Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 1819.)
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
These are the last two lines of E. E. Cummings’ sonnet “i thank You God for most this amazing” published in the collection XaipeI in 1950. In context, the lines are:
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
I take the parenthetical lines to refer to the birth or rebirth of insight and the entire poem as an explication of Psalm 118 which contains the line (Verse 24) “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Xaipe is the Greek verb for rejoice. In Prospero’s Cell, Lawrence Durrell writes, "When you see the gravestones from the little necropolis of Cameirus . . . it is the so-often repeated single word -- the anonymous Xaipe-- which attracts you . . . . It is not the names of the rich or the worthy . . . but this single word, 'Be Happy,' serving both as a farewell and admonition, that goes to your heart with the whole impact of the Greek style of mind, the Greek orientation to life and death: so that you are shamed into . . . realizing how little you have fulfilled . . . a thought so simple yet so pregnant, and how even your native vocabulary lacks a word whose brevity and grace could paint upon the darkness of death the fading colors of such gaiety, love and truth as Xaipe does upon these modest gravestones." "Prospero's Cell," originally published in 1945, is still, I believe, one of Lawrence Durrell's best books
“Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.”
These are the last lines of The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), the poem that begins with the famous lines “I fled Him down the nights, and down the days / I fled Him, down the arches of the years.” “Him,” of course, is God who is also the hound of heaven.
The image is of a loving God who has chased the poet implacably through his life. Suddenly, the poet realizes that his troubles are merely the shadow of God’s protecting, loving hand. “Dravest” is said to mean drives. If so, the last line equates God and love in the same manner as the epistle 1 John 4:8: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
“Nobody fucks with my hustle!”
Younger black musicians often though of Louis Armstrong as an Uncle Tom, misunder-standing his stage persona and his era. This was his answer. When asked, “What’s new?” he replied, “Nothin’ new—white folks still ahead.” Incidentally, he never called Orval Faubus an “uneducated plowboy.” The term he used was “no-good motherfucker.”
