Michel de Montaigne

Prose

Livy (64 or 59 BCE – 17 CE):
Nothing is more deceitful than a depraved piety by which the will of the gods serves as a pretext for crimes.

Suetonius (c69 – after 122 CE):
He who suffers before he needs to, suffers more than he needs to.
(Life of Caesar)

The Road to Perdition

There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something.
That is why ignorance is so strongly advocated by our religion as a quality appropriate to belief and obedience.
(pp 543-4)

In Man curiosity is an innate evil, dating from his origins …
The original Fall occurred when Man was anxious to increase his wisdom and knowledge: that path led headlong to eternal damnation.
Pride undoes man; it corrupts him; pride makes him leave the trodden paths, welcome novelty and prefer to be the leader of a lost band wandering along the road to perdition …
(p 555)

Whatever share in the knowledge of Truth we may have obtained, it has not been acquired by our own powers.
God has clearly shown us that [by choosing from among the common people] simple and ignorant apostles to bear witness of his wondrous secrets …
Our religion did not come to us through reasoned arguments or from our own intelligence: it came to us from outside authority, by commandments.
That being so, weakness of judgement helps us more than strength; blindness, more than clarity of vision.
We become learned in God's wisdom more by ignorance than by knowledge.
It is not surprising that our earth-based, natural means cannot conceive knowledge which is heaven-based and supernatural; let us merely bring our submissiveness and obedience …
(p 557)

Our minds are dangerous tools, rash and prone to go astray: it is hard to reconcile them with order and moderation. …
It is a miracle if you find one who is settled and civilized.
We are right to erect the strictest possible fences around the human mind. …
Certainly few souls are so powerful, so law-abiding and so well endowed that we can trust them to act on their own, allowing them liberty of judgement to sail responsibly and moderately beyond accepted opinion.
It is more expedient to keep them under tutelage.
(pp 629-30)

Every single idea which results from our own reflections and our own faculties — whether it is true or false — is subject to dispute and uncertainty. …
Everything we undertake without God's help, everything we try and see without the lamp of his grace, is vanity and madness.
(An apology for Raymond Sebond, p 622)

St Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers and a famous enemy of the Arian heresy, was in Syria when he was told that his only daughter Abra, whom he had left overseas with her mother, was being courted by some of the most notable lords of the land …
He wrote to her … saying that he had found for her during his journey a Suitor who was far greater and more worthy, a Bridegroom of very different power and glory, who would vouchsafe her a present of robes and jewels of countless price.
His aim was to make her lose the habit and taste of worldly pleasures and to wed her to God; but since the most sure and shortest way seemed to him that his daughter should die, he never ceased to beseech God in his prayers, vows and supplications that he should take her from this world and call her to Himself.
And so it happened: soon after his return she did die, at which he showed uncommon joy. …

[And,] when St Hilary's wife heard from him how the death of their daughter had been brought about by his wish and design, and how much happier she was to have quitted this world than to have remained in it, she too took so lively a grasp on that eternal life in Heaven that she besought her husband, with the utmost urgency, to do the same for her.
Soon after, when God took her to Himself in answer to both their prayers, the death was welcomed with open arms and with an uncommon joy which both of them shared.
(On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one's life, p 246)

Prose

Peace and Long Life

When one door closes, another opens.

— Scottish Proverb


Now all that was owed is repaid,
And all that was owned, returned.

Now all that was lost is found,
And all that was bound, free.

— Ursula Le Guin (1929 – 2018), Mountain Ways, Asimov's Science Fiction, 1996.


Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

— John Tolkien (1892 – 1970), The Lord of the Rings, 1968.

Nicolas de Caritat (1743 – 94) [Marquis de Condorcet]:
The time will come, when the sun will shine only on free men, who know no other master, but their reason.

Steven Pinker (1954):
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion.
It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty … can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.
(p 181)

People are better off abjuring violence, if everyone else agrees to do so, and vesting authority in a disinterested third party.
But since that third party will consist of human beings, not angels, their power must be checked by the power of other people, to force them to govern with the consent of the governed.
They may not use violence against their citizens beyond the minimum necessary to prevent greater violence.
And they should foster arrangements that allow people to flourish from cooperation and voluntary exchange.
(The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, 2011, p 183)

George Shaw (1856 – 1950):
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Richard Dawkins (1941):
Science is the poetry of reality.
(Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Preface, Random House, 1973)

Nils Nilsson (1933):
Missing out on useful beliefs is the price we pay for extreme skepticism. …
Accepting bad beliefs is the price we pay for extreme credulity.
(Understanding Beliefs, MIT Press, 2014, p 20)

John Keynes (1883 – 1946):
In the long run we are all dead.
(A Tract on Monetary Reform, Ch 3, 1923, p 80)

John Clarke (1948 – 2017):
Reason is a tool.
Try to remember where you left it.
(John Clarke's Poetry, Earshot, ABC Radio National, 15 April 2017)

James Cabell (1879 – 1958):
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
(The Silver Stallion, 1926)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951):
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
(Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Ed, 1967, Blackwell, p 4)

Arthur Clarke (1917 – 2008):
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
(Profiles of the Future, 1962)

I would be greatly distressed if [Childhood's End] contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media … with mind-rotting bilge about UFOs, psychic powers, astrology, pyramid energies, "channelling" — you name it, someone is peddling it …
(pp vi-vii)

Far off were the mountains,

• where power and beauty dwelt,
• where the thumder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen.

There the sun walked, transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in darness.
(Childhood's End, 1953 / 90, p 211)

Isaac Asimov (1920 – 92):
[Science] gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Democritus (c460 – c370 BCE):
The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527):
It is much safer to be feared than loved.
Love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are excessively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves.
But fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective.

Ralph Emerson (1803 – 82):
The order of things is as good as the character of the population permits.
(The Conservative, 1841)

Jules Verne (1828 – 1905):
The sea is everything.
It covers seven tenths of the globe …
The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it.
It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.
(Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870)

Henry Mencken (1880 – 1956):
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Herman Melville (1819 – 1891):
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it …
(Moby Dick, Chapter 41, 1851)

Imam Ali (599 – 661):
Knowledge is power …
(Saying 146, Nahj Al-Balagha)

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827):
An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.
For such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes. (Philosophical Essay on Probabilities)

Plato (c428 – c347 BCE):
[How] can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?
(Republic, c380 BCE)

It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body …
[For] if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, knowledge must be attained after death, if at all.
For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure. …
And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body? …
And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death.
(Phaedo)

Pliny (23-79):
There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain …
(Naturalis Historia, II, p vii)

Aristides (530 BCE – 468 BCE) [Plataea, 479 BCE]:
This is not the moment to argue … about matters of ancestry and personal courage. …
We did not come here to quarrel with our allies, but to fight our enemies; not to boast about our ancestors, but to show our courage in defence of Greece.
This battle will prove clearly enough how much any city or general or private soldier is worth to Greece.
(Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens, Ian Scott-Kilvert, Translator, Penguin, 1960, p 114)

Lewis Wolpert (1929):
Galileo’s argument is as follows.
Imagine a perfectly flat plane and a perfectly round ball.
If the plane is slightly inclined the ball will roll down it and go on and on and on.
But a ball going up a slope with a slight incline will have its velocity retarded.
From this it follows that motion along a horizontal plane is perpetual,

for if the velocity be uniform it cannot be diminished or slackened, much less destroyed.

So, on a flat slope, with no resistance, an initial impetus will keep the ball moving forever, even though there is no force.
Thus the natural state of a physical object is motion along a straight line at constant speed, and this has come to be known as Newton’s first law of motion.
(The Unnatural Unnatural Nature of Science, Harvard University Press, 1989)

Richard Dawkins (1941):
A given gene … either passes to a given offspring … or it does not.
There are no half measures, and genes never blend with one another.
Heredity is all-or-none.
[It’s] digital. …
A gene is a sequence of code letters, drawn from an alphabet of precisely four letters, and the genetic code is universal throughout all known living things.
Life is the execution of programs written using a small digital alphabet in a single, universal machine language.
This realization was the hammer blow that knocked the last nail into the coffin of vitalism and, by extension, of dualism.
(The Oxford Book of Science Writing, Oxford University Press, 2008, p 30)

Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832):
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
(A Critical Examination of the Declaration of Rights, Anarchical Fallacies, 1843)

Brian Greene (1963):
Much as a black hole’s mass increases when it absorbs anything that carries positive energy, so its mass decreases when it absorbs anything that carries negative energy.
(p 249)

It is common to speak of the center of a black hole as if it were a position in space.
But it’s not.
It is a moment in time.
When crossing the event horizon of a black hole, time and space (the radial direction) interchange roles.
If you fall into a black hole, for example, your radial motion represents progress through time.
You are thus pulled toward the black hole’s center in the same way you are pulled to the next moment in time.
The center of the black hole is, in this sense, akin to a last moment in time.
(Note 15, p 334)

Upon crossing the horizon, time and space interchange roles — inside the black hole, the radial direction becomes the time direction.
This implies that within the black hole, the notion of positive energy coincides with motion in the radial direction toward the black hole’s singularity.
When the negative energy member of a [virtual] particle pair crosses the horizon, it does indeed fall toward the black hole’s center.
Thus the negative energy it had from the perspective of someone watching from afar becomes positive energy from the perspective of someone situated within the black hole itself.
This makes the interior of the black hole a place where such particles can exist.
(Note 4, The Hidden Reality, Penguin, 2011, p 348)

Michael Dirda (1948):
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 78) believed it was only when] people lived unmediated existences in accord with Nature and themselves — when they dwelt like animals in a perpetual present [— that] they found life simple, fulfilling, and appropriate.
On some evil day, however, one man began to compare himself with another.
This led to reflection, self-awareness, and eventually competitiveness, then to specialization and a division of labor to maximize individual strengths and weaknesses, and before long the floodgates were opened to envy, accumulation, possessiveness, and excess.
The clever soon exploited their fellows, stockpiled provisions, and gained superfluous wealth — and these inevitably needed to be protected: by guards, by armies, by laws and statutes.
And so paradise was lost. …

[So, in order] to ameliorate inequities, we [should] establish kindlier, small city-states (he thought of Geneva and Corsica) where governmental regulation could be minimized and civic life made human-scaled.
Most of all, we can liberate ourselves.
(Classics for Pleasure, Harcourt, 2007, pp 160-1)

John Haldane (1892 – 1964):
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
(Possible Worlds, 1927)

Jacob Bernoulli (1655 – 1705):
We define the art of conjecture, or stochastic art, as the art of evaluating as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions we can always base ourselves on what has been found to be

• the best,
• the most appropriate,
• the most certain,
• the best advised;

this is the only object of

• the wisdom of the philosopher, and
• the prudence of the statesman.

(Ars Conjectandi, 1713)

Neal Stephenson (1959):
[After] a while, she said:

Do you need transportation?
Tools?
Stuff?

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,

I said:

We have a protractor.

(Anathem, Harper Collins, 2008, p 320)

Alan Milne (1882 – 56):

'Rabbit's clever,' said Pooh thoughtfully.

'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit's clever.'

'And he has Brain.'

'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit has Brain.'

There was a long silence.

'I suppose,' said Pooh, 'that that's why he never understands anything.'

(Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh, 1982)

Dylan Thomas

Prose

[The] morning fishwife gulls … heckling over Donkey Street, observe: …

Mrs Dai Bread Two,
gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees,
dirty pretty knees,
see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry,
high-heel shoes with one heel missing,
tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair,
nothing else at all but a dab of scent,
lolling gaudy at the doorway,
tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,
scowling at the sunshine,
lighting up my pipe; …

Miss Price,
in my pretty print housecoat,
deft at the clothesline,
natty as a jenny-wren,
then pit-pat back to my egg in its cosy,
my crisp toast-fingers,
my homemade plum and butterpat; …

Polly Garter,
under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby.
Nothing grows in our garden, only washing.
And babies.
And where's their fathers live, my love?
Over the hills and far away.
You're looking up at me now.
I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature.
You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. …

Polly Garter [Singing]:
I loved a man whose name was Tom
He was strong as a bear and two yards long
I loved a man whose name was Dick
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick
And I loved a man whose name was Harry
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry
But the one I loved best awake or asleep
Was little Willy Wee and he's six feet deep.

Oh Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I'll never have such loving again
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee
Little Willy Wee was the man for me.


Eli Jenkins:
Every morning, when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die.

And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us this holy night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, goodbye — but just for now! …


Captain Cat:
I'll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

(Under Milkwood, 1953)

William Gibson

Prose

[Terror] should remain the sole prerogative of the state.

— The Peripheral, 2014, p 144.


Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts.

— The Gernsback Continuum, 1981.

William Gibson (1948):
[Molly Millions was a slim] girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. …
White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones. …
She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood. …

Her T-shirt was sleeveless, faint telltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. …
Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. …
Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses, beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double edged scalpel in pale blue steel. …

[It was then that] I saw … that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets.
(Johnny Mnemonic, Burning Chrome, 1986)

William Gibson (1948):
[Contact] with “superior” civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy. …
[It’s] cargo cult time for the human race. …
We’re like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport; some of us actually manage to blunder onto flights to London or Rio, maybe even survive the trip and make it back. …
Flies in an airport, hitching rides. …
[We] can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years. …
There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who’ve followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). …
We’re like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports.
Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city.
(Hinterlands, Burning Chrome, 1986)

Arthur Doyle (1859 – 1930):
It was a September evening and … a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. …
Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare.
There was … something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light — sad faces and glad, haggard and merry.
Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more.
(The Sign of Four, Chapter 3, 1890)