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reetings from Australia.
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Thirty days hath
September
I want to be seen
here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or
artifice; for it is myself that I portray ... I am myself the matter
of my book.
I quote others only
in order the better to express myself. |
The Great Blondin, born
on this day in 1827, on a tightrope crosses Niagara Falls on
June 30,
1859, the first such crossing |
Nothing is so firmly
believed as that which we least know.
Michel de
Montaigne; ibid,
Ch. 32
The easy, gentle, and sloping path ... is not the path of
true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.
Michel de Montaigne; Essais, Book II, Ch. 11
When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to
her more than she is to me?
Michel de Montaigne; ibid, Ch. 12
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right...We
sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel de Montaigne; ibid
Saying is one thing and doing is another.
Michel de Montaigne; ibid, Ch. 31
I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare
speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.
Michel de Montaigne; Essais, Book III, Ch. 2
There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and
thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve
hanging ten times in his life.
Michel de Montaigne; ibid, Ch. 9
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on
our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit
only on our own bottom.
Michel de Montaigne; ibid, Ch. 13
Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better
than we do.
Michel de Montaigne; ibid
In barrenness …I hold a high place among
English poets, excelling even Gray.
Author AE Housman (A Shropshire Lad; Terence;
This is Stupid Stuff) writes
of his sparse output, February 28, 1910
So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.
Last words of Henry James,
novelist,
who died on February 28, 1916, aged 72
(Henry) James had a mind so fine that no idea
could violate it.
TS Eliot
When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him
carefully and with respect — but do not believe him. Never put your trust into
anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair
or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate – may be wrong.
The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the
younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders
said. So you must always be skeptical – always think for yourself.
Linus Pauling, American scientist, peace activist, author and educator, born on
February 28, 1901; Linus Pauling: Scientist and Peacemaker (2001) by
Clifford Mead and Thomas Hager
I have something
that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others
twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' [Pause.] The
twenty-five percent is for error.
Linus Pauling; Pauling's reply to an audience question about his ethical system,
following his lecture circa 1961 at Monterey Peninsula College, in Monterey,
California.
Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and
that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the
people who support them.
Linus Pauling
Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of
happiness in life.
Linus Pauling
From time to time throughout his long life, scientists and commentators
dismissed him as a showman. Would that we had a whole troupe of such scientific
showmen.
John Allen Paulos;
speaking of Linus Pauling, The New York Times Book Review (November
5, 1995)
An extraordinary person – a scientist, educator, humanist, and statesman
with worldwide impact in each of these roles.
John D Roberts; about Linus Pauling, Chemical & Engineering News (1990)
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be
wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
Linus Pauling; as quoted by Sir
Francis Crick in his
presentation 'The
Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology' (1995)
I have always wanted to know as much as possible about
the world.
Linus Carl Pauling; Linus Pauling In His Own Words (1995) by Barbara
Marinacci
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he
can do.
Sir Stephen Spender CBE, English poet, novelist and essayist, born on February
28, 1909; as quoted in The New York Times (March
26, 1961)
I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is
I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to
succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written
a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been
interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much
pain to people close to me
Sir Stephen Harold Spender; Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted
in 'When
Stephen met Sylvia' in The Guardian (April
24, 2004)
Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
Sir Stephen Spender; 'The Express' (l. 25–27) in Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry (1988) edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair
They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,
One cog in a golden singing hive ...
Sir Stephen Harold Spender; 'The Funeral' (l. 13–14)
Across this dazzling
Mediterranean
August morning
The dolphins write such
Ideograms:
With power to wake
Me prisoned in
My human speech
They sign: 'I AM!'
Sir Stephen Spender; from 'Dolphins'
Then, in a flush of rose, she woke and her eyes that opened
Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.
From her dew of lips, the drop of one word
Fell like the first of fountains: murmured
'Darling', upon my ears the song of the first bird.
'My dream becomes my dream,' she said, 'come true ...'
Sir Stephen Spender; from 'Daybreak'
A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about
what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which
something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of
reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a
different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense
of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.
Sir Stephen Spender; The Still Centre (1939) Foreword
We have found the secret of life!
Francis Crick, at the Eagle Pub in
Cambridge, England, February 28, 1953
Crick's brag in the Eagle, the pub where we habitually ate lunch, that we had indeed discovered that
"secret of life", struck me as somewhat immodest, especially in England, where understatement is a way of life.
Crick, however, was right. Our discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No.
James D
Watson; DNA: The Secret of Life, Alfred A Knopf, NY, 2003, xii
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of
deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features
which are of considerable biological interest.
James Watson and Francis Crick, opening sentence of 'A
structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid'
February 28 is the 59th
day of the year in the Gregorian
calendar, with 306
days remaining (307 in leap years).
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The Finnish epic is called the Kalevala, written by the esteemed Finnish writer, Elias Lönnrot, whose aim it was to increase the Finns' awareness of their identity as a nation. He travelled about the country, collecting epic tales, Finnish and Karelian folklore, lyrics, spells, laments and proverbs. Today, the writings are commemorated around the whole nation.
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