Chekov

Chekov on what it means to be "cultured":

"Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:

1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others. They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of india-rubber; if they live with anyone they do not regard it as a favour and, going away, they do not say “nobody can live with you.” They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see…. They sit up at night in order to help P…., to pay for brothers at the University, and to buy clothes for their mother.
3. They respect the property of others, and therefor pay their debts.
4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.
5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false….
6. They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P., [Translator's Note: Probably Palmin, a minor poet.] listening to the raptures of a stray spectator in a picture show, being renowned in the taverns…. If they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred roubles’ worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others are not admitted…. The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement…. Even Krylov has said that an empty barrel echoes more loudly than a full one.
7. If they have a talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity…. They are proud of their talent…. Besides, they are fastidious.
8. They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct…. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They do not ask for the cleverness which shows itself in continual lying. They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood…. They do not swill vodka at all hours of the day and night, do not sniff at cupboards, for they are not pigs and know they are not. They drink only when they are free, on occasion…. For they want mens sana in corpore sano [a healthy mind in a healthy body]."

(Source: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/29/anton-chekhov-8-qualities-of-cultured-people/)

December 2012

A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools. -Spanish proverb

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain. -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it - Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way. -E.L. Doctorow, writer (b. 1931)

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

November 2012

Three-fourths of the miseries nd misunderstandings of the world will dissapear, if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint.

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. -Richard Dawkins, biologist and author (b. 1941)

 “We are guilty of many crimes, but our worst sin is abandoning the child; neglecting the foundation of life. Many of the things we need can wait, the child can not. We can not answer Tomorrow, Her name is Today” -- Chilean Noble Prize winner poet and teacher Gabirela Mistral

October 2012

Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time? -Jane Smiley, novelist (b.1949)

Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

The worst kind of people are those who confuse kindness for weakness. -Werner Makowski, banker (b. 1929)

A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. -Mildred Witte Stouven

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you - Susan Sontag :D

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. -Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. -Bernard Berenson, art historian (1865-1959)

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. -T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

Gopi's Collection

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired of waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet, don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with triumph and disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken,
Twisted by knaves to make traps for fools,
Or watch the things you gave life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of your winnings,
And risk it in one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve sinew,
To serve you long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on';

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
If you can walk with kings and not lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds worth of distance run - 
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - what is more - you'll be a man my son!

- Rudyard Kipling


All that matters is Love and Work.
- Sigmund Freud

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerour men, for they act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
- T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926)

Your energy, you passion, your ability to lose yourself in the entirety and nitty-gritty of your venture to the exclusion of everything else is more important than capital. Thinking is the capital; enterprise is the way; hard work is the solution.
- APJ Abdul Kalam

You see things; and you say, 'Why?', but I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'
- George Bernard Shaw

'If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants'.
- Ogilvy  on Advertising

'In all healthy affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.'
- Bertrand Russell

Most of us don't get what we deserve because we do not ask for it.
- GRG

But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best laid plans of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy.
- Robert Burns poem 'To a Mouse'

Indecision is in itself grief.
- W. Shakesphere

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at flood, leads to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in the shallows and in miseries.
On a such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
- W. Shakesphere (Brutus in Julius Caesar)

If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe

If I am unable to make the Gods above relent, I shall move hell.
- Virgil

You can never plan the future by the past.
- Edmund Burke

I shall tell this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken'

It is not that I am a genius; I am infinitely more curious and I stay with the problem longer.
- Albert Einstein

Lead kindly light...
Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step is enough for me.
- Church Hymn - Lead Kindly Light

If a man does not know to which port he is steering no wind is favorable to him.
- Seneca

Fortune favors the brave.
- Virgil

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson in Ulysses

...

"Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come Great Work."
- Rabindranath Tagore
(quote pasted on the spine of a folder at CPR library)



Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)


Everyday people die and the rest live as if they are immortal. That, is the greatest wonder - Yudhisthir, Yaksha Prashna, Madhya Parva, The Mahabhararta

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help.
- Thich Naht Hanh


What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)


When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)


To a mind that is still, the whole world surrenders.
- Lao Tsu

..

Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. -Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)


"To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves."
- Novelist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).




The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled land with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
-Florence Luscomb, architect and suffragist (1887-1985)

Before you judge others or claim any absolute truth, consider that - 
- you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% if the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are travelling at 220 kilometers per second across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not "you". The atoms in your body are 99.99999999999999999% empty space and note of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of a rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don't just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.


Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide. -Eric Sevareid, journalist (1912-1992)

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. -Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)