Listing Through Life

1. The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books … But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times.

2. A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.

3. Personally, the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.

4. The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

5. He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.

6. Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls “the mad pride of intellectuality,” taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.

7. Now and then I am asked as to what books a statesman should read,  and my answer is, poetry and novels — including short stories under the head of novels.

8. Ours is in no sense a collector’s library. Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it. We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.

9. [We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

10. Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.

He also said: “I as emphatically object to nothing but heavy reading as I do to nothing but light reading — all that is indispensable being that the heavy and the light reading alike shall be both interesting and wholesome.”

His one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they  might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old mans’ love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the way place in a sentence or subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.

from Roughing It, by Mark Twain

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To the Klinchon people of north-western Canada, walking and knowing are barely divisible activities: their term for “knowledge” and their term for “footprint” can be used interchangeably.

The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb “to learn,” meaning “to acquire knowledge.” Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English “leornian,” “to get knowledge, to be cultivated.” From “leornian” the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word “liznojan,” which has a base sense of “to follow or to find a track” (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix “leis-” meaning “track”). “To learn” therefore means at root — to follow a track. Who knew? Not I, and I am grateful to the etymologist-explorers who uncovered those lost trails connecting ‘learning’ with path-following.

In its original verb-form, the Arabic “sarha” meant “to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, allowing them to wander and graze freely.” It was subsequently humanized to suggest the action of a walker who went roaming without constraint of fixed plan. One might think the English equivalent to be a ‘stroll,” an “amble” or a “ramble,” but these words don’t quite catch the implications of escape, delight and improvisation that are carried by sarha. “Wander” comes close, with its word-shadow of ‘wonder,” as does the Scots word “stravaig,” meaning to ramble without set goals or destination, but best of all perhaps is “saunter,” from the French “sans terre,” which is a contraction of “a la sainte terre,” meaning “to the sacred place;” i.e. “a walking pilgrimage.” Saunter and sarha both have surface connotations of aimlessness, and smuggled connotations of the spiritual.

There is a Spanish saying, “caminar es atesorar!“: “To walk is to gather treasure!”

from The Old Ways, by Robert Macfarlane

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We’ve got a blind date with destiny … and it looks like she’s ordered the lobster. (The Shoveller)

from the movie Mystery Men

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He [Churchill] called Attlee “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” and “a modest man with much to be modest about.”

Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments with dispatch and to perfection. The creative child, on the other hand, is manipulative, imaginative and intuitive. He is likely to harass the teacher. He is regarded as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, lacking in seriousness or even promise. His behavior is distracting; he doesn’t seem to be trying; he gives unique answers to banal questions, touching off laughter among the other children … 70 percent of pupils rated high in creativity were rejected by teachers picking a special class for the intellectually gifted.

from The Last Lion: Visions of Glory, by William Manchester

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You just can’t help some people until they’ve hit rock bottom, and by then you’ve lost interest.

from the TV show Seinfeld