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On Other Ideas: On the Mind, Emotions, Human Nature On Creativity This page>On Love; On Learning & Miscellaneous Short Quotes On Modernity and Related Matters On Israel, Jewish/Spiritual Matters and Anti-Semitism
Only – but this is rare – When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When jaded with rush and glare, Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear, When in our world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed – A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again; The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life’s flow.
Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life
When he shall die
Take him and cut him out into stars
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Wm. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, quoted by Bobby Kennedy in memory of his slain brother, John.
The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and “otherness.” Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body, another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me.
Octavio Paz
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Love is a choice -- not simply or necessarily a rational choice,
but rather a
willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.
Carter Heyward, Our Passion for Justice (1984)
...Breaking up is hard to do.
Neal Sedaka & Howard Greenfield (1962)
... I wonder why passion's always half impossibility
but lovers that we lose we never dare forget
we visit them in mourning in December and in May
in the graveyard of St. Mary's of Regret"
Susan Werner, St. Mary's of Regret
For those
who may be hurting over lost love:
Don't cry because it is over... smile because it happened."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of
understanding and misunderstanding.
Diane Arbus
The first duty of love is to
listen.
Paul Tillich
Nobody out there can love you the way you want to be loved. Only you can do that.
John-Roger
Love is the music, sex is only the instrument.
Isabelle Allende
The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being.
They are
not diplomats. They tell the truth.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
No more
words. In the name of this place we
drink in with our breathing, stay quiet like a flower.
So the nightbirds will start singing.
It is an ancient metaphysical law that says that we never leave any situation
that causes us discomfort [or is a problem] until we learn to love it or at least
to see love at work in it.
Quoted by Eleanor Futscher
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive...
Anais Nin
The essence of being human, is that one does not seek perfection, that one
is sometimes willing to
commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does
not push asceticism to the point where it makes
friendly intercourse impossible,
and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up
by life, which
is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi
Sex:
the pleasure is momentary,
the position ridiculous,
and the expense damnable.
Lord Chesterfield
He moved his lips
about her ears and neck as though in thirsting search of an erogenous zone.
A waste of time, he knew from experience. Erogenous zones were either
everywhere or nowhere.
Joseph Heller
On Education - Legal or Otherwise
At school you are not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making
mental efforts under criticism.
You go to a great school not so much for
knowledge as for arts or habits; for the art of expression, for
the art of
entering quickly into another's thoughts, for the art of assuming at a moment's
notice a new
intellectual position, for the habit of submitting to censure and
refutation, for the art of indicating assent
or dissent in graduated terms, for
the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working
out
what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental
courage and mental soberness.
Monrad G. Paulsen, Mental
Efforts Under Criticism
in his final statement to the
University of Virginia law faculty as its dean, January 12, 1976.
He, in turn, draws the quote from an
18th Century British schoolmaster.
Thanks to Steve Pepper for introducing me to this quote.
In the art of teaching, we recognize that ideas and insights need to cook over a period of time.
Sometimes the student who is least articulate about expressing the ideas is in fact the one who is absorbing
and processing them most deeply. This applies as well to our own private learning of our art form; the
areas in which we feel most stuck and most incompetent may be our richest gold mine of developing
material. The use of silence in teaching then becomes very powerful.
Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation
in Art and Life (1990)
Learning is not the accumulation of scraps of knowledge. It is growth, where every act of knowledge develops the learner….
Husserl, interpreted by Quentin Lauer
In a society excessively devoted to the bottom line – what
the philosopher William James called the “cash value”
of ideas – intellectuals
play a vital role in offering a more elevated approach to democratic debate.
Through
their teaching and writing, they free us from the tyranny of
short-sightedness by enlarging our understanding of historical and social
context. They provide us with an alternative to a culture of celebrity and
sound bites.
James O. Freedman,
Liberal Education & the
Public Interest
The task of the modern educator is
not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947). from Doug Linder's wonderful site.
The normal adult never
troubles his head about the space-time problems. Everything there is to be
thought about, in his opinion,
has already been done in early childhood. I, on
the contrary, developed
so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and
time
when I was already grown up.
Albert Einstein
We
often make the mistake of confusing education with training, when in fact these
are very different
activities. Training is
for the purpose of passing on
specific information necessary to perform a
specialized activity. Education is
the building of
the person. To educe means to draw out or evoke
that
which is latent; education then means drawing out the person’s latent
capacities
for understanding
and living, not stuffing a (passive) person full of
preconceived knowledge. Education must tap into
the close relationship between
play and exploration; there must be permission to explore and express.
There
must
be validation of the exploratory spirit, which by definition takes us out
of the tried,
the tested, and the homogeneous.
Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life (1990)
For good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelfful of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us. Good teaching is a certain kind of stance, I think. It is a stance of receptivity, of attunement, of listening.
Laurent A. Daloz , Effective Teaching and Mentoring
Good judgment comes from
experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
Tom Watson, former IBM CEO
We tend to feel a little
queasy whenever someone reads a prepared speech – even a very good one – instead
of talking directly to us. If you are giving a public talk, it is fine to plan
what you might say in order to sharpen
your awareness, but when you arrive,
throw away your plans and relate, in real time, to the people in the room.
In
many schools, teaching is expected to follow syllabi that lay out what students
will learn, as well as when
and how they will learn it. But in a real
classroom, whether kindergarten, graduate school, or the school of life,
there
are live people with personal needs and knowledge.
A particular tap in this
direction will shift this person’s perspective;
after today’s discussion you
know that this reading will be good
to assign, based on what seems like
the natural flow to the next step. You cannot play these things. You have to
teach each person,
each class group, and each moment
as a particular case that
calls out for particular handling. Planning an agenda of learning
without
knowing
who is going to be there, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how
they interact, prevents surprises and
prevents learning.
The teacher’s art is to
connect, in real time, the living bodies of the students with the living body of
the knowledge.
Steven Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in
Life and Art
JLW Comment on the following: 'Casner and Leach' , from which the folliwng is dawn, was far
and away the most widely adopted Property casebook during my years as a law student (and
was assigned to my class at Penn); and was the first book I adopted as a Property teacher in 1972.While in tone, the quote reflects the vintage of its authors and some classic Harvard condescension,
and the summary is subject to some other minor criticism or augmentation. it remains
perhaps the best short summary of lawyerly qualities I've seen. My semi-famous older brother
Bart, see infra, was an Estate Planning student of Casner's at Harvard. He speaks very well of the
course, noting with a chuckle Casner's opening of the last class session of the course, when
Casner reportedly said words to the effect of:(I'm not sure I've got the fee-- in early 1960s dollars -- correct; and surely the students had already paid quite a fee for his time!)You have only 50 minutes more of my time for no fee. Responses to questions after those 50 minutes will be charged at my normal rate of $175/hour!
Legal education has made some progress since that comment!
And now let Casner & Leach speak for themselves:
"The Basic Qualities of a Good Lawyer "
The best way to describe a good lawyer in a phrase is to call him or her a
professional in versatility.
This is another way
of saying that a good lawyer
has acquired certain abilities which allow him or her
to operate effectively in
any enterprise,
familiar or unfamiliar, to diagnose its difficulties, and to
contribute substantially to solution of the problems. A lawyer's
usual field of
operation is one in
which the legal ingredient is large, and to this the lawyer
brings professional knowledge
as well as
the basic abilities; but the fact that
the non-legal ingredient is frequently dominant and further the fact
that
the
situation in which the lawyer's help is solicited are many and varied give the
lawyer the habit
of tackling new problems
with confidence and skill, regardless
of their nature.
Our listing of the basic qualities is the following:
These are not qualities which spring naturally from family background plus a
liberal arts education.
You will be shocked at
your deficiencies in all of
them…. But be not dismayed, for the qualities can
be acquired and developed….
The important thing
is that you realize that this is what [your legal
education]
is striving for -- this, even more than "teaching law."
Beyond this list of rather earthy qualities, … lie insight, ingenuity,
imagination and judgment -- naïve
qualities which distinguish
the artist from
the artisan, genius from competence. And above all
stands character -- that
indispensable resource in a profession
which is charged with maintaining
equal
justice under law….
No specific reference is made above to social consciousness as a basic
quality of a lawyer. The issue is
one of relevance. If a
member of the bar
litigates the validity of a clause in a deed which restricts the use
of land
without considering the consequences
to the community of this type of
restriction, the lawyer
will be giving the client very bad representation. On
the other hand, if
the lawyer draws a will for
a Rockefeller, or cross-examines
a lying witness in a tort case, while reflecting on the inequalities
of
the
distribution of wealth, the lawyer is not likely to do the best job of which he
is capable.
James Casner and W. Barton Leach, Cases and Text on Property 1-4 (3rd Ed 1984): The Study of the Law of Property.
I want to believe -- and so do you -- in a complete, transcendent,
and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable
rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live
righteously. I want to believe -- and so do you -- in no such thing,
but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves
what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and
as a species, what we ought to do. What we want, Heaven help us, is
simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at
the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.
Arthur A. Leff, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law 1979 Duke Law Review 1229
A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
No one has earned the right to intellectual ambition until they have learned to
lay their course by a star
which they have never
seen – to dig by the divining
rod for springs which they may never reach. In saying
this I point to that
which will make your
study heroic. For I say to you in all sadness of
conviction, that to
think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as
idealists.
Only when you have worked alone – when you
have felt all around you
a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which
surrounds the dying, and
in
hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will
you have achieved.
Thus only
can you gain the secret isolated joy of the
thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after they are dead and
forgotten,
people who have never heard of them will be moving to the measure of their
thought – the subtle
rapture of a postponed power,
which the world knows not
because it has no external trappings, but which
to their prophetic vision is
more real than that which
commands an army. And if this joy shall not be yours,
still it is only thus that you can know that you have done what it lay
in you to
do – can say that you have
lived, and be ready for the end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, “The
Profession of Law,”
an 1886 speech to Harvard undergraduates
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
The seed of every new growth within its sphere has been a felt necessity.
The form of continuity has been kept up by reasonings purporting to reduce everything to a logical
sequence; but that form is nothing but the evening dress which the new-comer puts on to make itself
presentable according to conventional requirements. The important phenomenon is the man underneath
it, not the coat; the justice and reasonableness of a decision, not its consistency with previously held
views. No one will every have a truly philosophic mastery over the law who does not habitually consider
the forces outside of it which have made it what it is.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1880)
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm S. Forbes
Whether you think you can or can't, you're right.
Henry Ford
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason,
and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
I could prove God statistically.
George Gallup
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Andre Gide
You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best
golfer is a black guy,
the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the
USA of arrogance and the Germans don't
want to go to war !"
Chris Rock, March, 2003
Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit
down quietly, may alight upon you."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a puma or
a giraffe. You can't help seeing that all of them are right. They're never in any embarrassment. They
always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't pretend. They
are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.
Hermann Hesse
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer
The annals of art and science are full of
stories of men and women who, desperately stuck on an enigma, have
worked until
they reached their wit’s end, and then suddenly made their longed-for creative
leap or synthesis
while doing errands or dreaming. The ripening takes place when
their attention is directed elsewhere.
Insights and breakthroughs
often come during periods of pause or refreshments after great labors. There is
a preparatory period of accumulating data, followed by some essential in the
same vein that we learn to swim in
winter and skate in summer. We learn that
which we do not concentrate on, the part that has been exercised
and trained in
the past but that is now lying fallow. Not doing can sometimes be more
productive than doing.
Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
A
professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
W. H. Auden
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mohandas
Karamchand
(Mahatma) Gandhi
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Gandhi
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Gandhi
The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend. Abraham Lincoln
There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac,
wisdom
often quoted by Morris J. Winokur
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality,
they are not certain; and as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1950
The only road to strength is through vulnerability. Stephen Nachmanovitch, in Free Play (1990)
Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident and money
takes wings. All that endures is character. Don't
cry for me when I go. You'll
hold me back on my journey. How deep is my thought? So deep that it
can be
mistaken for being cold and distant."
Forrest Sanford
He’s not prolific, he’s
incontinent.
David Brooks,
New York Times Book Review, January 13, 2002;
reviewing Hon. Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A
Study of Decline,
rating and applying ‘economic
analysis’ to explain the dearth of true intellectuals’
in postmodern America, and their propensity toward ‘crude rationicination’.
Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx
They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
There is nothing so absurd but
some philosopher has said it.
Cicero
... and some Yogi Berra classics:
"It's like deja vu all over again."
"Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical."
"Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."
"So I'm ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face."
"Take it with a grin of salt."
"The game's isn't over until it's over."
"The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase."
"You can observe a lot just by watching."
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
"I never said most of the things I said."
