The Saunterer

Blaise Pascal on logic and feelings

    According to Blaise Pascal there are two ways of knowing:

    The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. . . . We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

    (Quoted from page 99 of Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal. 1910. The Harvard Classics.)

    For a brief biography of Blaise Pascal, click here. For images of or relating to Blaise Pascal, click here.

William Wordsworth on the value of nature and solitude

    We would all do well, William Wordsworth suggests, to spend more time in nature and solitude, for these reasons:

    Let then the Youth go back, as occasion will permit, to Nature and to Solitude. . . . A world of fresh sensations will gradually open upon him as his mind puts off its infirmities, and as instead of being propelled restlessly towards others in admiration or too hasty love, he makes it his prime business to understand himself. New sensations, I affirm, will be opened out—pure, and sanctioned by that reason which is their original Author: and precious feelings of disinterested, that is self-disregarding, joy and love may be regenerated and restored:—and, in this sense, he may be said to measure back the track of life which he has trod.

    (Quoted from page 327 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of William Wordsworth, click here. For images of or relating to William Wordsworth, click here.

Elizabeth Knowlton on why climb mountains

    With the following, Elizabeth Knowlton gets nearer the truth than “Because it is there.”

    To those men who are born for the mountains, the struggle can never end, until their lives end. To them it holds the very quintessence of living—the fiery core, after the lesser parts have been burned away.        

    (Quoted from page 194 of The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2, by Jennifer Jordan. W. W. Norton, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Elizabeth Knowlton, click here. For images of or relating to Elizabeth Knowlton, click here.
    For information about Jennifer Jordan, click here. For images of or relating to Jennifer Jordan, click here.
    For images of K2, click here.

Leo Tolstoy on war as a racket

    History has many examples of wars that started with a country’s sick economy. Its politicians and business leaders set about curing it, trumping up the view that another country(s) was an enemy. Then it is only a matter of stirring up patriotism, setting the factories to full work supplying the war machine. Long before Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, Leo Tolstoy confirmed their kind, saying:

    Patriotism and its results—wars—give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades.

    (Quoted from page 97 of Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, by Judith Allen. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.)

    For a brief biography of Leo Tolstoy, click here. For images of or relating to Leo Tolstoy, click here.
    According to her publisher, “Judith Allen leads the Virginia Woolf Discussion Group at Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written on James Joyce, Michel de Montaigne, and Virginia Woolf, and has done editorial work and book reviews for Journal of Modern Literature, Woolf Studies Annual, and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany.”

Arthur Calder-Marshall on intuition

    Writers and filmmakers rely on understanding without conscious reasoning:

    Imperceptibly shots would start to sort themselves, migrating from film-can to film-can and gathering like molecules round a nucleus. But there was no conscious thought directing it. . . . Flaherty would suddenly realize that he was looking at a sequence. It was a peculiar sensation. One day a mere collection of shots joined up together, the next, a perceptible semblance of a sequence, seemingly self-generated, organic, belonging.

    (Quoted from page 189 of Musicologia, by Robin Maconie. The Scarecrow Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Arthur Calder-Marshall, click here. For images of or relating to Arthur Calder-Marshall, click here.
    For a brief biography of Robin Maconie, click here. For images of or relating to Robin Maconie, click here.

A. A. Berle on values higher than the value of economic growth

    A. A. Berle once listed the following ten (Can you think of any others? Do any of his conflict?):

1. People are better alive than dead.
2. People are better healthy than sick.
3. People are better off literate than illiterate.
4. People are better off adequately than inadequately housed.
5. People are better off in beautiful than in ugly cities and towns.
6. People are better off if they have opportunity for enjoyment—music, literature, drama, and the arts.
7. Education above the elementary level should be as nearly universal as possible through secondary schools, and higher education as widely diffused as practicable.
8. Development of science and the arts should continue or possibly be expanded.
9. Minimum resources for living should be available to all.
10. Leisure and access to green country should be a human experience available to everyone.

     (From “What GNP Doesn’t Tell Us,” by A. A. Berle, Jr. Page 10 of the Saturday Review, 31 August 1968.)
     For a brief biography of A. A. Berle, Jr., click here. For images of or relating to A. A. Berle, Jr., click here.

Galileo Galilei on what the individual has to contribute to science

    Most everything was his answer:

    In questions of science, the authority of a thousand in not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

    (The above quotation by Galileo is from page 93 of Energy and Climate Wars: How naive politicians, green ideologues, and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate, by Peter C. Glover and Michael J. Economides. Continuum, 2010)

    For a brief biography of Galileo Galilei, click here.
    For a brief biography of Peter C. Glover, click here. For a brief biography of Michael J. Economides, click here.

Henry L. Mencken on self-control

    Cravings stand in the way of self-control, and H. L. Mencken once listed six methods of combating them:

    In general there are but six ways in which a given craving may be overcome. First, we may avoid opportunities for its gratification and so, by a long disuse, weaken and destroy it. Secondly, we may regulate its gratification, and by thus encompassing its flux and reflux within fixed limits, gain intervals during which it is faint. Thirdly, we may intentionally give ourselves over to it and so wear it out by excess—provided we do not act like the rider who lets a runaway horse gallop itself to death and, in so doing, breaks his own neck,—which unluckily is the rule in this method. Fourthly, by an intellectual trick, we may associate gratification with an unpleasant idea, as we have associated sexual gratification, for example, with the idea of indecency. Fifthly, we may find a substitute in some other craving that is measurably less dangerous. Sixthly, we may find safety in a general war upon all cravings, good and bad alike, after the manner of the ascetic, who, in seeking to destroy his sensuality, at the same time destroys his physical strength, his reason and, not infrequently, his life.

    (Quoted from page 233 of The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Henry L. Mencken. The Noontide Press, 1982. Copyright in 1908 by Henry L. Mencken.)
    For a brief biography of H. L. Mencken, click here. For images of or relating to H. L. Mencken, click here.

Charles F. Kettering on how to achieve

    The most effective learning is learning through failing. Charles F. Kettering:

    Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

    (Quoted from page 194 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    To see what a finger post (also called a guide post) looks like, click here.
    For a brief biography of Charles F. Kettering, click here. For images of or relating to Charles F. Kettering, click here.

Victor F. Weisskopf on the two keys of human existence

    The two keys are aspects of mind and heart, which Victor F. Weisskopf puts this way:

    Human existence depends upon compassion and curiosity. Curiosity without compassion is inhuman; compassion without curiosity is ineffectual.

    (Quoted from page 332 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Victor F. Weisskopf, click here. For images of or relating to Victor F. Weisskopf, click here.