Category: Aphorisms by Others

Two Pipe Quotations

My referrers' list points me to this post whence I snagged these two delightful quotations:

The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.

William Makepeace Thackeray 

A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan.”

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

The name 'Bulwer-Lytton' rings a bell doesn't it?  You guessed right: it's the same Bulwer-Lytton who penned, in prose of purple, the opening sentence,

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

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On Duty: Commentary on an Aphorism by Henri-Frederic Amiel

"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it." (From Journal Intime)

This is a penetrating observation, and a  perfect specimen of the aphorist's art. It is terse, true, but not trite. The tip of an iceberg of thought, it invites exploration below the water line.

If the world were literally a dream, there would be no need to act in it or take it seriously. One could treat it as one who dreams lucidly can treat a dream: one lies back and enjoys the show in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do this or refrain from that, I take the world to be real, to be more than maya or illusion. Feeling duty-bound, I help realize the world.  It is an "unfinished universe" in a Jamesian phrase and  I cannot play within it the role of mere spectator.  I must play the agent as well; I must participate whether I like it or not, non-participation being but  a definicient  mode of participation.  In a Sartrean phrase, I am "condemned to be free": I am free to do and leave undone, but my being free does not fall within the ambit of my freedom.

And to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do something, to make real what merely ought to be, I am referred to this positive world as to the locus of realization.

But just how real is the world of our ordinary waking experience? Is it the ne plus ultra of reality? Its manifest deficiency gives the lie to this supposition, which is why great philosophers from Plato to Bradley have denied ultimate reality to the sense world. Things are not the way they ought to be, and things are the way they ought not be, and everyone with moral sense feels this to be true. The Real falls short of the Ideal, and, falling short demonstrates its lack of plenary reality. So while the perception of duty realizes the world, it also and by the same stroke de-realizes it by measuring it against a standard from elsewhere.

The moral sense discloses a world poised between the unreality of the dream and the plenary reality of the Absolute.  Plato had it right: the human condition is speleological and the true philosopher is a transcendental speleologist.

The sense of duty detaches us from the world of what is by referring us to what ought to be. What ought to be, however, in many cases is not; hence we are referred back to the world of what is as the scene wherein alone ideals can be realized.

It is a curious dialectic. The Real falls short of the Ideal and is what is is in virtue of this falling short. The Ideal, however, is only imperfectly realized here below.  Much of the ideal lacks reality just as much of the Real lacks ideality. Each is what it is by not being what it is not. And we moral agents are caught in this interplay. We are citizens of two worlds and must play the ambassador between them.

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Nicolás Gómez Dávila on the Vatican II Church

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994) is an outstanding aphorist of a decidedly conservative, indeed reactionary, bent. What follows are some of his observations on the Catholic Church of the Second Vatican Council.  I found them here thanks to Karl White.  I've added a couple of comments in blue.

The phenomena of the decay of Catholicism are entertaining; those of Protestantism dull. (p. 191)

Tongues of fire didn’t descend upon the Second Vatican Council, as they did upon the first assembly of the apostles, but a stream of fire – a Feuerbach. (p. 245)

If one were to translate Ludwig Feuerbach's name into English it would come out as Firebrook.  (Of course, one does not translate proper names; at most one transliterates them.)  Feuerbach was an important influence on Karl Marx.  He is famous or notorious for the notion that God is an unconscious anthropomorphic projection.  Man alienates himself from his best attributes by unconsciously projecting them, in maximized forms, upon a nonexistent transcendent being. 

A single council is nothing more than a single voice in the real ecumenical council of the Church: her complete history. (p. 265)

Popular Catholicism is the target of all progressive anger. Popular faith, popular hope, popular charity exasperate a clergy of petit bourgeois origin. (p. 266)

For the left-wing Catholic Catholicism is the great sin of the Catholic. (p. 248)

Catholics have lost that sympathetic capacity of sinning without arguing that sin doesn’t exist. (p. 274)

The problems of man can be neither exactly defined nor even remotely solved. Whoever hopes that Christianity can solve them ceases to be a Christian. (p. 285)

Add 'here below' at the end of the first sentence, and then the aphorism is true.

The progressive Catholic is only active in zealously seeking for whatever he can still hand over to the world.

Better a small church with Catholics than a numerous one with Rotarians. (p. 334)

Today’s Church is so nice as to exclude everything from the revealed traditions which public opinion condemns. (p. 319)

The current pope prays for that progress which Bury – its historian – called the “substitute for Providence.” (p. 319)

The thing that exasperates today’s Christian about the Middle Ages is Christianity. (p. 319)

The new liturgists have abolished the sacred pulpits in order that no scoundrel can assert that the Church intends to compete with the secular ones. (p. 319)

Catholics don’t have the slightest idea that the world feels betrayed by the concessions made to it by Catholicism. (p. 325)

The progressive clergy crowns the towers of the church of today not with a cross but with a weathervane. (p. 325)

Only the Catholic on the brink of losing his faith is outraged by the Church’s dazed state, sent by Providence.

St. Thomas Aquinas: an Orleaniste of theology? (p. 350)

Aggiornamento is the sellout of the Church. (p. 363)

The progressive Catholic collects his theology from the garbage can of Protestant theology. (p. 363)

Intending to open her arms to the world the Church instead opened her legs. (p. 363)

Instead of a theology of the mystical body the theologians of today teach a theology of the mystical masses. (p. 363)

Today it is impossible to respect the Christians.  Out of respect for Christianity. (p. 379)

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Temptation

A striking one or two sentence formulation taken from a wider context is not an aphorism, strictly speaking.  But I'm in a loose and liberal mood.  So I present for your consideration and delectation the following sentence from Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901-1944).  It is from his essay "The Moral Problem of Suicide," translated from the French by Cynthia Rowland and bound together with "The Experience of Death" in a volume entitled The Experience of Death (Arno Press, New York, 1977).  The sentence occurs on p. 69.

Temptation is an experience of the difference between the vertigo of power and the decision of duty.

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Old Carl

It must have been the fall of '72.  Old Carl and I were sitting in his Culver City flophouse room drinking Brew 102 after a day's manual labor .  He delivered himself of a line not to be forgotten.

"Bill, once I was limber all over but stiff in one place.  Now it's the other way around."

Safe Speech

"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.  Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's  mouth shut.  That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in  – she construed it as sexual harrassment.  You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble.  In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion.  To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be.  Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?

Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed.  Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals.  Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior.  The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'

You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them.  My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs.  But I will.  Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose. 

Companion post: Idle Talk

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H. L. Mencken on the Perfection of Democracy

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron." – – H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920  (Via Bill Keezer, via Keith Burgess-Jackson)

The great and glorious day is come, my friends, and we finally have the president we deserve.  God help us.

According to Snopes, the above quotation is not verbatim, but it is accurate in the main.  See Snopes for context.

Die Like a Man

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.