“When I look back on my early way in science, on the problems I studied, on the papers I published — and even more, perhaps, on those things that never got into print — I notice freedom of movement, a lack of guild-imposed narrowness, whose existence in my youth I myself, as I write this, had almost forgotten. The world of science was open before us to a degree that has become inconcievable now, when pages and pages of application papers must justify the plan of investigating, ‘in depth’, the thirty-fifth foot of the centipede; and one is judged by a jury of one’s peers who are all centipedists or molecular podiatrists. I would say that most of the great scientists of the past could not have arisen, that, in fact, most sciences could not have been founded, if the present utility-drunk and goal-directed attitude had prevailed.” (Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire)

“To believe that the persecution of witches was rife in the early Middle Ages ‘before the rise of scientific ideas’; that France was not prosperous but impoverished in 1789; that ancient Greece was a peace-loving democracy, peopled entirely by artists and patrons of art; that murder has for centuries been punished by death, and property similarly protected because valued as highly as life; that Magna Carta is the original charter of democratic rights, that scientific discovery precedes technological advance; that the first universities were established to teach liberal arts and did teach them; that Roman law is the antithesis of the English Common Law and contributed nothing to it; that Machiavelli was a ruthless, immoral cynic, Macaulay an apologist for the Whig interest, and Plato a liberal rationalist, that until Darwin nobody knew about evolution and that only after him did religious faith begin to totter; that Hegel was the theorist of Prussian state tyranny and Nietzsche an advocate of world conquest by Nordics; that as the year 1000 approached all Europe feared the end of the world — to believe these and a hundred other pieces of ‘common knowledge’ causes error and blindness in current decisions about science, religion, art, education, criminology, revolution, and social action generally.” (Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors)

“We cannot of course all be experts in everything; we are always governed, and I hope willingly, by those whom we believe to be expert; but our society has already reached a point in its development where the expert can be recognized only by an educated judgment. The standard demanded of the man in the street (and outside our own special field, we are all men in the street) rises with every generation.” (W. H. Auden, Criticism in a Mass Society, 1941)

200 English translations of Horace’s Donec Gratus Eram (Odes 3.9):

Isaac Waisberg, 2022, Horace’s Donec Gratus Eram (PDF Book)

More Collections of Translations.

From Winston Churchill’s My Early Years.

When the last sound of my mother’s departing wheels had died away, the Headmaster invited me to hand over any money I had in my possession. I produced my three half-crowns which were duly entered in a book, and I was told that from time to time there would be a ‘shop’ at the school with all sorts of things which one would like to have, and that I could choose what I liked up to the limit of the seven and sixpence. Then we quitted the Headmaster’s parlour and the comfortable private side of the house, and entered the more bleak apartments reserved for the instruction and accommodation of the pupils. I was taken into a Form Room and told to sit at a desk. All the other boys were out of doors, and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown-covered book filled with words in different types of print.

“You have never done any Latin before, have you?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“This is a Latin grammar.” He opened it at a well-thumbed page. “You must learn this,” he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. “I will come back in half an hour and see what you know.”

Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.

Mensa
Mensa
Mensam
Mensae
Mensae
Mensa

a table
O table
a table
of a table
to or for a table
by, with or from a table

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense of it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I there upon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorise the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.

In due course the Master returned.

“Have you learnt it?” he asked.

“I think I can say it, sir,” I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.

“What does it mean, sir?”

“It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension.”

“But,” I repeated, “what does it mean?”

“Mensa means a table,” he answered.

“Then why does mensa also mean O table,” I enquired, “and what does O table mean?”

“Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,” he replied.

“But why O table?” I persisted in genuine curiosity.

“O table, you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.” And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, “You would use it in speaking to a table.”

“But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement.

“If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,” was his conclusive rejoinder.

Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.

“I am happy too that the subject of my lecture should be Walter Bagehot, who has been my revered and, indeed, I feel, intimate companion for over a quarter of a century. The gift he has bestowed on me is what he himself called ‘immortality by association.’ Posterity cannot take up many people, so my advice to those who have such ambitions is this: if you cannot be a genius yourself, attach yourself to one who is, and then you will be drawn onwards into the future like a speck in the tail of Halley’s comet.” (Norman St John-Stevas, 1987, The Omnipresence of Walter Bagehot)

“To bring new and valuable knowledge by lecturing before fifty or a hundred students a year is not research, for it is not publication, except in the legal sense. But to print such knowledge in a periodical where only a few will peer at it with skepticism or dismay — that is to enlarge human horizons, to make the university shine in a new glory, and to justify an early promotion.” (Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect)

“The man who has given his heart entirely to the quest for the things of this world is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time to find, possess, and enjoy them. The memory of life’s brevity constantly spurs him on. Beyond the goods he possesses, he is forever imagining a thousand others that death will prevent him from savoring unless he makes haste. This thought feels him with anxieties, fears, and regrets and keeps his soul in a state of constant trepidation that impels him again and again to change plans and places. If the taste for material well-being is coupled with a social state where neither law nor custom still keeps anyone in his place, this restlessness of spirit is further exacerbated. We will then find men constantly changing course for fear of missing the shortest road to happiness.” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Goldhammer)

“I am not really the helpless type, but I have never been very fond of the sort of aggressive scholarship that is now encountered everywhere, trying to sell to humanity brand-new laws of nature as if they were used cars. A feeling of tentativeness; an appreciation of the provisional and fragmentary character of human insight into nature; a consideration of how much arrogance and rashness must attend even the deepest understanding before generalizing statements can be made about life: all this will be part of the inheritance with which the many years have burdened the scientist as he grows older. If he is any good, he will become more modest.” (Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire)

“Twenty-five hundred years ago Master Kung recognized clearly that it is the disorder of the language that produces the disorder of the state. It is written in The Analects of Confucius (Waley translation):

If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. If what is to be done cannot be effected, then rites and music will not flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, then punishments will go astray. And if punishments go astray, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. Therefore the gentleman uses only such language as is proper for speech, and only speaks of what it would be proper to carry into effect. The gentleman, in what he says, leaves nothing to mere chance.

I should be sorry if these words led to the conclusion that all that Master Kung’s gentleman lacked was a word processor.” (Erwin Chargaff, 1986, Serious Questions)