Today’s One-Liner (#121)
He that has read Shakespeare with attention will perhaps find little new in the crowded world. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, dedication in Mrs. Lennox’ Shakespeare Illustrated, 1753, cited in A Johnson Sampler, edited by Henry Darcy…
Category: World Literature
Today’s One-Liner (#117)
The more man plans, the harder God laughs. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Today’s One-Liner (#116)
A true friend will stab you in the front. –Oscar Wilde, via Bob Dylan, Friends and Neighbors, Theme Time Radio Hour, 2006
Something I Came across in “First Things”
Alyosha Karamazov suffers tormenting doubt because the miracle he expected does not occur. But when he finds himself engaged in active love in consoling Grushenka, he discovers a faith that is compatible with uncertainty. That…
Today’s One-Liner (#105)
Be not too hasty to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men. –Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia
Today’s One-Liner (#103)
I accept the torment of accusation and of my disgrace before all, I want to suffer and be purified by suffering! –Dmitri Karamazov, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Today’s One-Liner (#96)
I boasted to Rakitin that I gave an onion, but I’ll say it differently to you: in my whole life I’ve given just one little onion, that’s how much good I’ve done. –Grushenka to Alyosha,…
Today’s One-Liner (#94)
Things that give you pleasure—When someone you don’t like meets with some misfortune, you’re pleased even though you know this is wicked of you. –Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney
Today’s One-Liner (#86)
I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson
Russian Reflections on Kindness
1. When nineteenth-century novelists exposed the hypocrisy of cruel people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned acceptance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hypocrisy is the…