“There are people who occasionally engage in thinking when they have nothing better to do. It is a harmless activity, much practiced in former times, but now unfortunately fallen into desuetude. There is so much else to do. Montaigne, the greatest master of latitudinal thinking, roamed widely, if not always profoundly: there was virtually nothing that could not serve him as a hook on which to hang his thought, his reminiscences and remarks. His Essays have been greatly admired for nearly four hundred years; whether they still are read widely I do not know. He wrote at a time when the languages of antiquity enjoyed a vigorous afterlife which now has surely come to a regrettable end; the many quotations from ancient authors with which his writings are adorned so richly, as with so many strings of pearls, can now hardly find a receptive ear.” (Chargaff, Serious Questions)

“If the world can still be saved, it will be saved by the amateurs. The experts are more than most other people responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves. They know too much about too little, but each knows something special. They can barely understand each other; they do not talk with each other; they sit and serve. To the lay world, they are of very limited use. If you want to tap them, you must know exactly where: the barrels are studded all over with false faucets, releasing nothing but hot air. Only one spigot communicates with the fount of expert knowledge, ready to drench you with more than you wish to know.” (Chargaff, Serious Questions)

Aurora interea miseris mortalibus almam
extulerat lucem, referens opera atque labores.
(Virgil, Aeneid, Book XI)

Aurora rose, spreading her pitying light,
And with it bringing back to sight the labors
Of sad mortality, what men have done,
And what has been done to them; and what they must do
To mourn.
(David Ferry, 2017)

Meanwhile, Dawn raised her nurturing light and summoned
Wretched mankind to its work and hardship.
(Sarah Ruden, 2008)

Soon
the Dawn had raised her light that gives men life,
wretched men, calling them back to labor
and mortal struggle.
(Robert Fagles, 2006)

Dawn at that hour
Brought on her kindly light for ill mankind,
Arousing men to labor and distress.
(Robert Fitzgerald, 1981)

Meanwhile Dawn had lifted up her kindly light for weary men,
recalling them to task and toil.
(H Rushton Fairclough, 1918; Revised by GP Goold, 2000)

The morn had now dispell’d the shades of night,
Restoring toils, when she restor’d the light.
(John Dryden, 1697)

“A single cause linked to a single effect is not an historical but a laboratory possibility. The difference between them is that life presents a multiplicity of conditions, all of which are causes, whereas laboratory technique permits the artificial isolation and control of single conditions in a one-to-one relation within a closed system.” (Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors)

Professor J. H. Plumb, who with his usual irony applauds innocent play with numbers, does so on this very ground of rhetoric: ‘We are becoming a numerate society: almost instinctively there seems now to be a greater degree of truth in evidence expressed numerically than in any literary evidence, no matter how shaky the statistical evidence, or acute the observing eye. It is often not the numbers that speak the truth, rather there is a quicker acceptance of them in ourselves — almost an excitement’.” (Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors)

“There are many whose faults go undetected only because they are ineffectual: when these grow confident of their strength, they will act no less audaciously than those whose fortunes have already given them opportunity. They lack only the resources to display the full extent of their iniquity. Even a poisonous snake is safe to handle in cold weather, when it is sluggish. Its venom is still there, but inactive. In the same way, there are many people whose cruelty, ambition, or self-indulgence fails to match the most outrageous cases only by the grace of fortune. Just give them the power to do what they want, and you will see: they want the same things as others do.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics)

“In short, the market — like the state, like any institution — has its limitations, as severe as the state’s. Consequently, each device must be controlled by intelligence and adapted to circumstance. For my part, I am a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist, each dogma applicable to some necessary activity. I imagine, in fact, that the triple label applies to most people. Very few want the fire department a private concern; and again most people are communists within the family circle, at least until the children are grown up.” (Jacques Barzun, Letter to Christopher Faille)

“For a long life, you need the help of fate; but to live sufficiently, the essential thing is one’s character. A life is long if it is full, and it is full only when the mind bestows on itself the goodness that is proper to it, claiming for itself the authority over itself. What help are eighty years to a person who has spent his life in doing nothing? Such a person has not lived; he has simply hung around in life. Rather than dying in old age, he has spent a long time dying.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics)

“The achievements of a lifetime, put together with great effort and many answered prayers, are cast to ruin in a single day. But to speak of a day is to make our hastening calamities slower than they really are. An hour, a mere moment is enough to overturn an empire. It would be some relief to our frailty and our concerns if everything came to an end as slowly as it comes into existence. The reality is that it takes time for things to grow but little or no time for them to be lost.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics)

“In the light of this description the analogy so passively received nowadays, of the mind as computer, is manifestly fallacious. A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to “know”—bits of information all cast in the digital mode—has no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and the program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority. Homer nods, Shakespeare writes twaddle, Newton makes mistakes, you and I have been known to talk nonsense. But they and we can (as the phrase goes) surpass ourselves, invent, discover, create. The late John von Neumann, mathematician, logician, and inventor of game theory, would not allow one to liken the mind to a computer. He knew how his mind worked and he understood his computer. So goodbye to all the bright remarks, in fiction and conversation, about programming oneself to pass an interview.” (Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James)