A cultivated mind finds sources of inexhaustible pleasure in all that surrounds it, in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind past and present, and their prospects for the future. (J.S. Mill)
On Career
Who reflects too much will accomplish little. (von Schiller)
Our life is frittered away by detail . . . simplify. (Thoreau)
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. (Burke)
The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. (Du Bois)
My definition (of a philosopher) is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. (Alcott)
Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh. (Herodotus)
Speculation, knowledge, is not the chief end of man; it is action. (Burnap)
Judge Learned Hand was a "slow, meticilous, reflective thinker in a field that often requires quick thinking and spunk." Early in practice his boss urged him to stick with brief writing. In Gerald Gunther's biography he notes how Hand left the pursuit of philosophy for law.
He would overcome and transcend the distinction between the lawyer's life of action and the philosopher's life of contemplation.
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. (Stravinsky)
The power of now undermines the value of those experiences and activities that require slowness to develop . . . the creation of the arts and the search for answers to life's greatest problems and mysteries. (Stephen Bertman, Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed)
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. (Benjamin Franklin)
On Writing
Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well aranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much les than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and respectfully thought over. For only by universally combining what we know, by comparing every truth with every other, do we fully assimilate our knowledge and get it into our power. (Schopenhauer)
But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias. The way in which questions are put, the points of view assumed, presuppose a relativity of interest; all characteristics imply values, and every objective description, so called, implies an ethical background. (De Beauvoir)
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness. (Bruner)
The writer knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall . . . that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see. (Faulkner)
The art of being wise if the art of knowing what to overlook. (James)
Philosophers must have influence even on the morals of the street where they live. (Voltaire)
When you steal from one author it is plagiarism. If you steal from many, it's research. (Mizner)
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night. (Blake)
Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff—you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them they are not worth the search. (Merchant of Venice)
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. (Bacon)
I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together. (Montaigne)
The two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. (Johnson)
Legal scholarship, in whatever form, must have as its object influencing the direction of the law—ideally by moving judges, lawyers, legislators, and bureaucrats to rethink or reconsider a particular problem. (Krotoszynski, 1999)
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. (Schopenhauer)
Today, we need not just information. We need knowledge - information edited for accuracy and organized for a purpose. And we need more than that. We ned wisdom. We need to be able to apply that knowledge to solve our problems. (Dilenschneider Dec. 7, 2000)
On Reading
A great deal of reading . . . is prejudicial to one's own thinking. . . . Very many scholars have read themselves stupid. . . . We should not read too much lest the mind becomes accustomed to the substitute for original thinking. (Schopenhauer).
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. (Mead)
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. (Solzhenitsyn)
Education has produced a vast populace able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. (Trevelyn)
A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written. (Jefferson)
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him: for what he reads as a task will do him little good. (Boswell)
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. (Milton)
Affect not as some do that bookish ambition to be stored with books and have well-furnished libraries, yet keep their heads empty of knowledge; to desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping. (Peacham)
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. (Bacon)
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations — such is a pleasure beyond compare. (Kenko)
What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read. (Samuel Johnson)
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. (CS Lewis)
On Teaching
It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to a master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn’t want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you. I have watched this from both sides of the net; for when, as a teacher myself, I have tried to answer questions brought me by pupils, I have sometimes, after a minute, seen that expression settle down on their faces which assured me that they were suffering exactly the same frustration which I had suffered from my own teachers.
The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t." (C.S. Lewis)
On Life
Principles may be one way a person can define her identity. Further, principles followed over an extended period are a way a person can integrate her life over time and give it more coherence. (Nozick)
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. (Russell)
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile. (Coleridge)
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation. (Scott)
After the first million, it doesn't matter. You can only eat three meals a day - I tried eating four and I got sick. You can't sleep in more than one bed at night. Maybe I have twenty suits, but I can only wear one at a time, and I can't use more than two shirts a day. (Joseph Hirshhorn, TIME July 1955)
Life's a precious and wonderful thing. you can't sit down and let it lap around you...you have to plunge into it; you have to dive through it! and you can't save it, you can't store it up; you can't horde it in a vault. you've got to taste it; you've got to use it. the more you use, the more you have...that's the miracle of it. (Kyle Chrichton, THE HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE 1956)
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. (Theophrastus)
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Newton)
By my Physical Constitution, I am but an ordinary Man. . . . Yet some great Events, . . . have at Times, thrown this Assemblage of Sloth, Sleep, and littleness into Rage a little like a Lion. (Adams)
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past. (Patrick Henry)
On Law
A page of history is worth a volume of logic. (Holmes)
Laws are sand. Customs are rock. (Twain)
The Life of the law has not been logic. It has been experience. (Holmes)
The law embodies the story of a nation's development . . . cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. (Holmes)
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. (Einstein)
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other. (Chekhov)
On Art
Only through art can we get outsiude of ourselves and know another's view of the universe. (Proust)
Paintin is only a bridge linking the painter's mind with that of the viewer. (Delacroix)
Inspirational Movie Songs
Flashdance (1983) - based in Pittsburgh where I completed undergraduate studies
St. Elmo's Fire (1985) - based in Georgetown where I completd my graduate and law studies