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The following is a rather famous classification that has served as an ice-breaker for countless articles and chapters and even titles of books :
"There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says : The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system more or less coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel and has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way ....centrifugal rather than centripetal. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
- Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox
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Was reading attentively, when came across this useful advice both for seasoned readers and budding writers and it couldn't have been better put:
"....for example, in such a way as to get the greatest conflict and density and brutality and energy and tension and whatever else concentrated and focused in the poem. Well, there are two ways, I think. There is, apart from this poet who is constantly trying to intensify, there is the poet who is himself in such an anxious state that he turns to the poem not to create an even more intense verbal environment, but to do just the contrary; to ease that pressure. And this poet is I think potentially the greatest poet. But, he must in the very dissolution or effort to ease that pressure, he must not lose it; the reader must know that it’s there, that the pressure is there. But the very great poet has such good manners, it seems to me, that he only indicates and touches on, as if to spare the reader more exposure than he can handle. Do you know what I mean?"
- A R Ammons, Set in Motion
The mind of a poet!
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This is one of my most favourite quotes ever, and it's timeless as well as inspiring:
"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another" - Charles Dickens.
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A river can cut through rocks not because of its power but because of its persistence. - Jim Watkins
just read this the other day...
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"Reading one's friends' books is a good deal like kissing their wives, I suppose. The less said about it, the better. The truth is that I am always horribly embarrassed by either job."
- Wallace Stevens, Letter to Reyher, 1922
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"Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
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"Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness."
- Nabokov, Lik (Middle English for countenance)
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From an old friend:
"People are like food. There are lots of bourgeois who seem to me like boiled beef: all steam, no juice, and no taste (it fills you up straight away and is much eaten by bumpkins). Other people are like white meat, freshwater fish, slender eels from the muddy river-bed, oysters (of varying degrees of saltiness), calves’ heads, and sugared porridge. Me? I’m like a runny, stinking macaroni cheese, which you have to eat a lot of times before you develop a taste for it. You do finally get to like it, but only after it has made your stomach heave on countless occasions."
- Flaubert, Letters
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"Every culture, no doubt, has its theory of illness. In the Western world generally, and perhaps in all countries where a Judeo-Christian morality prevails, it is the punishment theory of illness that has taken hold: we are ill because we have done wrong, or sometimes because our parents have done wrong. The punishment theory is an extrapolation to disease of such homely observations as those which connect stomachache with eating injudiciously, hangover with excess drinking, and syphilis with venery.
The punishment theory is deeply erroneous and can sometimes be very cruel. The idea that prolapse of the uterus is a consequence of *****ual overindulgence has already been cited as an example of Aristotle’s gullibility and his habitual confusion between what is true and what ought, he felt, to be true. The punishment theory is a natural ally of the belief that *****ual activity, being pleasurable, must be deleterious; not so long ago the idea that women had *****ual desires and derived pleasure from their gratification was repudiated as a 'vile calumny', and until recently generations of schoolboys were solemnly warned that masturbation might make them go blind and perhaps even mad."
- P. B. Medawar, Aristotle to *****s
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Two extracts from Sinyavsky's brilliant essay on Socialist Realism, as announced by Gorky in 1925, leading to the prodigiously sterile "Soviet Art":
"Stalin seemed to be specially made for the hyperbole that awaited him: mysterious, omniscient, all-powerful, he was the living monument of our era and needed only one quality to become God — immortality. Ah, if only we had been intelligent enough to surround his death with miracles! We could have announced on the radio that he did not die but had risen to Heaven, from which he continued to watch us, in silence, no words emerging from beneath the mystic mustache. His relics would have cured men struck by paralysis or possessed by demons. And *****ren, before going to bed, would have kneeled by the window and addressed their prayers to the cold and shining stars of the Celestial Kremlin. But we did not listen to the voice of our conscience. Instead of intoning devout prayers, we set about dethroning the “cult of personality” that we ourselves had created."
"The strength of a theological system resides in its constancy, harmony, and order. Once we admit that God carelessly sinned with Eve and, becoming jealous of Adam, sent him off to labor at land reclamation, the whole concept of the Creation falls apart, and it is impossible to restore the faith."
- On Socialist Realism, Abram Tertz (pseudonym for Andrei Sinyavsky)
There are too many gems from this brief essay, I had to restrain myself, choosing just the two.
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