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“Sir: It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honor & success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling, my love of peace, my respect for your good qualities, and my pity of your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself, with its jealousies, suspicions & fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you, or fail in respect for you. If you do not cure your self of this temper it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil: and for His sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.”
Letter written in 1778 by Benjamin Franklin (his angriest ever, says Isaacson) to Arthur Lee of Virginia, a fellow commissioner to France; Cited in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 332.
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
Quoting Paul Erdós, a Hungarian mathematician; T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic (January 2005), 16.
“It’s not from nostalgia for the past that I study crafts, but because I don’t have that adoration of handmade things; I’d rather not have to see my thumbprints in the things I make. It was more as an antidote to industrial culture, a reality check, that I went back to India to look at the crafts. I want to recapture that basic feeling, the way children in the act of drawing are so in tune with themselves, the way that craft allows you to explore the sensory quality of materials.”
Brilliant craft designer Satyendra Pakhalé (formerly with Frog Design/Apple and Philips/Renault interior), trained in India and Switzerland; Jane Szita, “Pure and Symbol,” Dwell Magazine (February 2007), 119.
“‘. . . among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.’”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 700; written to his father, dated 28 May, 1927; citing (from memory, of course!), the words of Alphonsus, King of Aragon found in Essays of Sir William Temple, vol. 2 (1822), 93-4.
“Disinterestedness was the most common term the founders used as a synonym for the classical conception of virtue or self-sacrifice; it better conveyed the threats from interests that virtue seemed increasingly to face in the rapidly commercializing eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson had defined disinterested as being ’superior to regard of private advantage; not influenced by private profit,’ and that was what the founders meant by the term. We today have lost most of this earlier meaning. Even educated people now use disinterested as a synonym for uninterested, meaning ‘indifferent or unconcerned.’ It is almost as if we cannot quite imagine someone who is capable of rising above a pecuniary interest and being unselfish or impartial where an interest might be present.”
Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 16.
“For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God’s decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him.”
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.7.2 (Battles edition).
“The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.”
Mankind will worship celebrity. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 7.
“So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to go off and amuse himself conquering the world. Such a pastime was all right for Augustus and Alexander; they were young men, not easily held in check, but Caesar ought to have been more mature.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Translated by Alban J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 132 (Brunschvicg numbering).
“… the proportions of Earth on which we are prepared or able to live are modest indeed: just 12 percent of the total land area, and only 4 percent of the whole surface if you include the seas.”
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (New York: Broadway, 2003), 246.
