The Saunterer

Samuel Johnson on kindness to animals

    James Boswell remarked this about Samuel Johnson’s loving concern for his cat:

    I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat; for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike of the poor creature.

    (Quoted from the foreword of Lily & Hodge & Dr. Johnson, Silent Books. Cambridge, 1991).
    For a brief biography of Samuel Johnson, click here. For images of or relating to Samuel Johnson, including a statue of Hodge, click here.
    For a brief biography of James Boswell, click here. For images of or relating to James Boswell, click here.

Loren Eiseley on making a difference

    Lovely idea, this of Loren Eiseley:

    As a young boy walked the beach at dawn, he noticed an older man picking up starfish and tossing them into the sea. Catching up with the man, the boy asked why he was doing this. The older man explained that the stranded starfish would die if left in the morning sun.
    “But the beach goes on for several miles, and there are millions of starfish,” exclaimed the boy. “How can you possibly make a difference?”
    The older man looked at the starfish in his hand and, as he threw it safely back into the sea, said to the young boy, “I will make a difference to that one.”

    (Adapted from Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower; quoted from page 101 of Up and Out of Poverty, by Philip Kotler and Nancy R. Lee. Prentice Hall, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Loren Eiseley, click here. For images of or relating to Loren Eiseley, click here.
    For a brief biography of Philip Kotler, click here. For a brief biography of Nancy R. Lee, click here.

Andrew Carnegie on philanthropy

    Among the few who understand the noble purpose of money was Andrew Carnegie:

    This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he has strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.

    (Quoted from page 15 of The Gospel of Wealth, by Andrew Carnegie. The Century Co., 1901.)
    For a brief biography of Andrew Carnegie, click here. For images of or relating to Andrew Carnegie, click here.

George Orwell on the role of punishment in teaching

    Motivation in school learning today is restricted to a variety of carrots. Yet for some subjects -– one is the classics -– carrots were never enough. George Orwell’s remark makes us consider that perhaps we should reintroduce the (humane) use of the stick:

    I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

    (Quoted from page 53 of Bad Students Not Bad Schools, by Robert Weissberg. Transaction Publishers, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of George Orwell, click here. For images of or relating to George Orwell, click here.
    For a brief biography of Robert Weissberg, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Weissberg, click here.

Henry Beston on what society loses when it lives apart from Nature

    For this, Henry Beston gets full marks:

    What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy.

    (Quoted from page 354 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of Henry Beston, click here (there, be sure to view “How to write like Henry,” and other goodies). For images of or relating to Henry Beston, click here.

Alan R. Andreasen on the power of decoy names to shape attitudes

    Iceland was supposedly given its uninviting name to discourage immigration to it; Greenland, its inviting name to attract. So the story goes about these decoy names, and whether true or not there is a principle behind it, which Frank Luntz explains:

    Words can make a difference when you are trying to get the public to pay attention to a problem. For years, the Republican Party tried to get the public–-and politicians–-to do something about the “estate tax.” This was a tax to be paid from an estate when it was passed on to heirs. The Republicans argued that this constituted double taxation on people’s earnings and was unfair on its face. However, the public seemed to associate the word estate with wealthy people and apparently felt that the wealthy had too much money anyway, and maybe they got it from coupon clipping, not real work.
    Republican consultant Frank Luntz proposed a simple solution: Call it a “death tax.” This simple word change did much to increase public sympathy. Luntz found in his polls that, although a narrow majority would repeal an inheritance or estate tax, an overwhelming majority would repeal a death tax. Presumably it seemed really unfair to penalize people for dying.

    (Quoted from page 31 of Social Marketing in the 21st Century, by Alan R. Andreasen. Sage Publications, 2006.)
    For a brief biography of Alan R. Andreasen, click here. For images of or relating to Alan R. Andreasen, click here.
    For a brief biography of Frank Luntz, click here. For images of or relating to Frank Luntz, click here.

Oprah Winfrey’s precepts about one’s instincts

    On this the Saunterer is at odds with Oprah Winfrey, but in fairness quotes her:

    Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.

    The trouble is we tend to confuse our instincts with our heart. We let our heart get the better of our head, and think we are making a superior instinctive decision.
    If Oprah Winfrey were correct, personal decisions would nearly always be correctly made, which doesn’t happen.
    (Quoted from page 77 of Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth about Parenting and Happiness, by Jessica Valenti. New Harvest, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.)
    For a brief biography of Oprah Winfrey, click here. For images of or relating to Oprah Winfrey, click here.
    For a brief biography of Jessica Valenti, click here. For images of or relating to Jessica Valenti, click here.

Friedrich Froebel on children’s play

    Properly guiding the play of puppies and kittens turns them out well. Friedrich Froebel concluded the same with children:

    People think the child is only seeking amusement when it plays. That is a great error. Play is the first means of development of the human mind, its first effort to make acquaintance with the outward world, to collect original experiences from things and facts, and to exercise the powers of body and mind. The child, indeed, recognizes no purpose in it and knows nothing, in the beginning, of any end which is to be reached when it imitates the play it sees around it, but it expresses its own nature, and that is human nature, in its playful activity. The further its development proceeds the more significant are the various movements which we know as the movements of the human being, from which all human culture has originated.
    But this is only the case when these movements can express themselves unhindered and unfalsified, and the child’s nature has not been perverted and led into false paths. The human instinct needs guidance by free movements, while the brute instinct finds its goal without guidance. This guidance can only be given by one who knows the goal which is to be reached by the manifold activity of the blind, natural feeling of the child. Without rational, conscious guidance, childish activity degenerates into aimless play instead of preparing for those tasks of life for which it is destined.   

    (Quoted from page 67 of Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel, by Baroness B. Von Mraenholz-Bülow. Translated by Mrs. Horace Mann. Lee and Shepard, 1905.)
    For a brief biography of Friedrich Froebel, click here. For images of or relating to Friedrich Froebel, click here.
    For the little we could find on Baroness B. Von Mraenholz-Bülow, click here.
    For a brief biography of Mrs. Horace Mann, click here. For images of or relating to Mrs. Horace Mann, click here.

Jerome Kagan on why some children are poor at mathematics

    Their erroneous beliefs about basic mathematical concepts, explains Jerome Kagan, restrain them:

    Some children have great difficulty separating mathematical representations from the more familiar representations for words. Carl Jung, who provided an example of this psychological block, recalled his profound inability to accept the argument: If a = b and b = c then a = c because he always replaced the letter symbols with semantic concepts and rebelled against the possibility that if cats = pets and pets = dogs then cats = dogs. “My intellectual morality fought against these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from understanding mathematics.”

    (Quoted from page 35 of The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century, by Jerome Kagan. Cambridge University Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Jerome Kagan, click here. For images of or relating to Jerome Kagan, click here.
    For a brief biography of Carl Jung, click here. For images of or relating to Carl Jung, click here.

Samuel Gilbert on beauty

    Not only do we want to cultivate beauty, we want to put it into words. Proof that beauty is above evil is that no normal person wants to cultivate evil and put it into words.
    Three hundred years ago, people cultivated floral beauty. Reverend Samuel Gilbert cultivated Primula auricula, a species of primrose that grows wild in the mountains of central Europe. Here are his words:

Their gold, their purples, scarlets, crimson dyes,
Their dark and lighter-haired diversities,
With all their pretty shades and ornaments,
Their parit-coloured coats and pleasing scents. . . .
In double ruffs, with gold and silver laced,
On purple crimson, and so neatly placed.

    (Quoted from The Florist’s Vade-mecum, by Samuel Gilbert. London: J. Taylor, G. Coniers, and T. Ballard, 1702.)
    For images of Primula auricula, click here. For a bit about Samuel Gilbert, click here.