Biographilia
I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world,…
Category: World Literature
Imagine: The Macbeths Coming over for Dinner
Shakespeare presents them as the happiest married couple in all his work. –Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 518
Acting on This Could Save Some Energy
But whatever be the motive of insult, it is always best to overlook it, for folly scarcely can deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted in Paul Fussell, Samuel…
Memorable Scenes
It has been said of the play “Hamlet” that its best scene is the one in which Horatio first sees the ghost, or the one in which he tells Hamlet of it, or the one…
He Contains Multitudes
[Hamlet] inherits the virtues of a score of his predecessors–and some of their weaknesses. Yet he is no mere recapitulation of them. In him, rather, they recombine to make a man as individual as he…
Scholars
1. “What will a pundit’s scholarship profit him if he does not think of God and has no discrimination and renunciation? Of what use is erudition if the mind dwells on ‘woman and gold’?”–Sri Ramakrishna,…
Unodious Comparisons
Make the most and best of your lot, and compare yourself not with the few that are above you, but with the multitudes which are below you. –Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of…
Look on the Bright Side
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. –Oscar Wilde, quoted in Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples
A Carpe Diem Reminder
The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform….
A Mosaicist
… Proust had never been able to finish any work of fiction because he lacked the story and point of view. He had at last found his structure, one that was to prove ideal…