I
think I just did one of these Who said it? posts recently but I was
flipping through a Will Durant volume this week, saw this first quote and said to
myself, "Oh, who's counting? Do another." I have no idea if there have really been 12, but that's the number I'm up to whether it's accurate or not. But, just to change it up a
little, in this one the answer is always someone who lived at least part of
his/her life in the 17th century. My usual silly rule applies - I have to find the
quote in my personal library. Why, you ask? The answer to almost all of the questions
about decisions in my blog is "Because
it's my blog." And so for this.
a) Oliver Cromwell b) John Locke c) Peter the Great d) Jonathan Swift
1) Being of
opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means, I was
so much affected that when one told me you were sickly and would not live, I
answered, 'twere better if you were dead, I desire you to forgive me for this uncharitableness.
For I am now satisfied that what you have done is just, and I beg your pardon
for having hard thoughts of you for it, and for representing that you struck at
the root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of ideas, and designed
to pursue in another book, and that I took you for a Hobbist. I beg your pardon also for saying or thinking
that there was a design to sell me an office, or to embroil me.
a)
Thomas Hobbes b) John Locke c) Isaac Newton d) Voltaire
2) In these four
things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what
men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostications, consisteth the
natural seed of religion, which, by reason of different fancies, judgments, and
passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those
which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another.
a)
Thomas Hobbes b) Isaac Newton c) Baruch Spinoza d) Jonathan Swift
3) After
experience had taught me that all things that frequently take place in ordinary
life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things I feared, and which
feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was
affected by them, I determined at last to inquire whether there might be
anything which might be truly good and able to communicate its goodness, and by
which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all other things.
a)
Louis XIV b) John Milton c) Blaise Pascal d) Baruch Spinoza
4) Why should
anyone assert for you the right of free suffrage, or the power of electing whom
you will to the Parliament? Is it that you should be able . . . to elect in the
cities men of your faction, or that person in the boroughs, however worthy, who
may have feasted yourselves most sumptuously, or treated the country people and
boors to the greatest quantity of drink? Then we should have our members of
Parliament made for us not by prudence and authority, but by faction and
feeding; we should have vintners and hucksters from city taverns, and graziers
and cattlemen from the country districts. Should one entrust the Commonwealth
to those to whom nobody would entrust a matter of private business?
a)
Oliver Cromwell b) John Locke c) John Milton d) William Shakespeare
5) The various
opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of
the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body, only with this difference,
that they have not left hope at the bottom. . . Truth is as hidden as the
source of the Nile, and can be found only in Utopia.
a) Oliver Cromwell b) John Locke c) Peter the Great d) Jonathan Swift
6) What a
Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy!
Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and
sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall
unravel this confusion?
a)
Charles II b) René Descartes c)
Blaise Pascal d)
Cardinal Richelieu
7) [I]n the compass
of time, suffered so great a loss of light and heat by the continual emission
of the corpuscles causing such phenomena, that they have become cold, dark, and
almost powerless pulps. We find even that sun spots . . . increase in size from
day to day. Now who knows if these are not a crust forming on the sun's surface
from its mass that cools in proportion as light is lost, and if the sun will
not become . . . an opaque globe like the earth?
a)
Cyrano de Bergerac b) Robinson
Crusoe c) Lemuel Gulliver d) Samuel Pepys
8) God almighty first planted a garden; and,
indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to
the spirits of man, without which building and palaces are but gross
handyworks; and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and
elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if
gardening were the greater perfection.
a) Francis Bacon b)
King James c) Martin Luther d) Galileo Galilei
9)
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires,
inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies,
apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey,
Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which
these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain . . . shipwrecks, piracies, and sea fights; peace,
leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A
vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations . . . opinions, schism, heresies . . . weddings, masquings,
mummeries, entertainments, jubilees . . . burials . . . .
a)
Queen Elizabeth I b) John
Donne c) Montaigne d) Rembrandt
10)
Yesterday I received extreme unction, and today I pen this dedication. The time
is short, my agony increases, hopes diminish. . . And so farewell to jesting,
farewell my merry humors, farewell my gay friends; for I feel that I am dying,
and have no desire but to see you happy in the other life.
a)
Cervantes b) King Charles I c) John
Donne d) El Greco
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1)
c - Isaac Newton 2) a - Thomas
Hobbes 3) d - Baruch Spinoza 4) c - John Milton 5) d - Jonathan Swift 6) c- Blaise Pascal 7) a - Cyrano de Bergerac 8) a - Francis Bacon 9) b - John Donne 10) a
- Cervantes
1) Being of
opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means . . .
This
somewhat apologetic if cantankerous fellow was none other than (c) Isaac Newton, maybe the most brilliant of the brilliant, but a
weird duck all the same. He was writing to John Locke and shows himself, even for the time, a little crazy. I like science and appreciate sacrifice and all that, but he stuck
a needle in his eye to see what happened - A NEEDLE! And that's crazy in any century. I guess though that one of the lessons of his life is
that if you want to compete for greatest all-time genius, you should
not spend a lot of time with the opposite sex. He was almost certainly never embroiled with a woman and died a virgin.
2) In these four
things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what
men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostications . . . .
(a) Thomas
Hobbes
gets a lot of bad press these days, being sort of seen as the hobgoblin of
"life is tough" and "isn't the king neat?" school of
thought. But, he really was a remarkable man, is given credit for starting
modern political discourse (I think it's a little exaggerated) and translated
for us Thucydides Peloponnesian War,
the first to do so from Greek to English (still being published). I put the
quote in as he was often criticized as an atheist. Probably it's not
technically so, or no more than it was with people like Spinoza or Locke or Jefferson were, who
were also accused, but he did not believe in the spirit world and thought
revelation could not be separated from rational thought. Personally, that
doesn't seem possible to me, but that's another post.
3) After
experience had taught me that all things that frequently take place in ordinary
life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things I feared, and which
feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was
affected by them. . . .
Well,
I can't see Louis XIV (a) being the answer, but no reason I can think of that
it couldn't be Milton or Pascal. But the answer was (b) Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher I occasionally start working on
every few years, but get lost in. Some of it is fascinating and some just so
tedious. He is very difficult to understand, if not as bad as Kant. Though
there are many books and articles on him which dumb it down, I'm not sure how
accurately. All the same, he was no doubt also highly influential. I am not as
sure as some others where to start modern philosophy, but certainly he is near
the start.
4)
Why should anyone assert for you the right of free suffrage, or the power of
electing whom you will to the Parliament? Is it that you should be able . . . .
Nobody
really knows what Shakespeare thought about such things as he wrote plays, not
prose. And, the anti-democratic streak here doesn't seem Lockean at all. Could
have been Oliver Cromwell but it was a supporter of his -- (c) John Milton.
5) The various
opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of
the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body . . . .
I
love philosophy, but it's hard to disagree with him. It was (d) Jonathan Swift.
6) What a
Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy!
Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and
sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall
unravel this confusion?
(c) Blaise Pascal. Sure it would be more
fun if it was Cardinal Richelieu, but it wasn't. I've never read Pascal
directly, just read this or that about him, mostly in Durant, or seen some quote
he wrote from time to time. His most famous thought is called Pascal's wager -
which is essentially this: If there is no God and you believe, you've lost
nothing. But if there is and you do not, you will be in a heap of trouble. So,
better to believe and be safe. The problem with this theory is that it requires
the same bet with respect to all religions that requires a set of beliefs in
order to avoid damnation. This, of course, sets up a paradox as you really
cannot be a traditional Muslim and a traditional Christian, for example, at the
same time.
7) [I]n the
compass of time, suffered so great a loss of light and heat by the continual
emission of the corpuscles causing such phenomena, that they have become cold,
dark, and almost powerless pulps . . . .
This
wannabe physicist/astronomer has to be (d) Pepys, the famous diarist as Gulliver, de Bergerac and Crusoe were all fictional. Except, of course, they weren't. (a) Cyrano de Bergerac was a
real person who lived all his short life in the 17th century. The play we know
his name from was written a couple of centuries later and is mostly fictional,
though some of the names were real and he did, apparently, have a bit of his
schnozz. Steve Martin's modern rendition, Roxanne,
doesn't get enough credit. In reality,
CdB was initially a soldier, but more importantly a relatively influential
dramatist. You could call some of it
17th century science fiction. And he wrote the above.
8) God almighty
first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is
the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which building and palaces
are but gross handyworks; and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to
civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely;
as if gardening were the greater perfection.
Start with that Luther never saw the
1600s and you have three. King James had
some things to say about religion, but not this. If Galileo spoke on gardening, I am not
familiar with it. But, this was (a) Francis Bacon, whose pithy and quotable
statements give me endless amusement. In my humble opinion, we give him too
little credit for his contributions to the rekindling of science as Descartes,
and was one of the leading lawyers of his time (though eventually, lost his
royal position of chancellor, so long sought by him, for accepting bribery -
which was as common then as attorneys working for judge's election committees is
now). But, I love him most for the occasional gem of
an aphorism. The occasional commenter here who calls himself Conchis gave me a
lovely hardcover 19th century copy of Bacon's essays is one of the few volumes
I have that I try hard never to spill coffee on. Aside from all that - I also love gardens.
9)
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires,
inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies,
apparitions, of towns taken . . . .
There's a description of the news that
makes you say, well nothing's changed in hundreds of years. The author didn't thinks so
much either and felt you could read the news once a year and get the gist of
it. It was (b) John Donne, whose meditation including "No man is an
island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part
of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well
as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own
were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,"
is certainly one of the most lyrical thoughts written down in the English language ever.
10)
Yesterday I received extreme unction,
and today I pen this dedication. The time is short. . . .
El Greco is inarguably one of the most distinctive
painters, and, in my humble opinion, greatest artists in history. King Charles I,
sentenced to beheading spent his last time speaking about his innocence and how
the people had no role in governing. John Donne, of course, reminded us that
the bell tolls for all of us, but the author of these last words was (a)
Cervantes. Though I love both the hapless Don and Sancho Panza, and am inspired by some of it, I can't read Cervantes very long. The actual book is very long and drawn out and just bores me. But, to be fair, he was inventing the modern novel and was writing at a very different time. Plus, I have trouble reading most novels -- even modern ones. But, leave all that aside. I hope I have the time, ability and desire to write as he did when
my turn comes. I have no problem contemplating my own death some day and have already written some short good byes, just in case there's not time. Though I don't really believe it, I like the metaphor of seeing
my friends on the other side, where cares, anxiety and competition are all a thing of the past. I plan on saying "See you on the other side" a lot in the end.
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