The Art of Tetman Callis

“Law, without equity, though hard and disagreeable, is much more desirable for the public good, than equity without law: which would make every judge a legislator, and introduce most infinite confusion.” – William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

“Judges should not be allergic to acknowledging that any one of our legal conclusions might be wrong. Judges are just humans in robes. We try to have as high a batting average as possible, but no one can get it right all of the time. All a judge can do is try his or her best to fairly, honestly, and faithfully interpret and apply the statute at issue and the relevant caselaw.” – Judge Lee P. Rudofsky, Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. The Arkansas Board of Apportionment

“But if there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is impossible to educate for this end, impossible to teach the world how to die away from its achieved, nullified form. The autumn must take place in every individual soul, as well as in all the people, all must die, individually and socially. But education is a process of striving to a new, unanimous being, a whole organic form. But when winter has set in, when the frosts are strangling the leaves off the trees and the birds are silent knots of darkness, how can there be a unanimous movement towards a whole summer of fluorescence? There can be none of this, only submission to the death of this nature, in the winter that has come upon mankind, and a cherishing of the unknown that is unknown for many a day yet, buds that may not open till a far off season comes, when the season of death has passed away.” – D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“Modernity has not turned out altogether well. To the pioneers of Enlightenment, it appeared that false certainties and artificial hierarchies were the chief obstacles to general happiness. To many the suspicion has by now occurred that there are no true certainties and no natural hierarchies, yet also that individual and social well-being require some certainties, some hierarchies. The rapid increase in mobility and choice, in sheer volume of stimuli that followed the erosion of traditional ways of life and thought has taxed, and occasionally overwhelmed, nearly every modern man or woman. This no longer seems, even to the most optimistic partisans of modernity, merely a phenomenon of transition. It may be that just as in any generation there are broad limits to physical and intellectual development, so also there are psychological limits, which likewise alter slowly. ‘Human nature,’ in short, though in an empirical rather than a metaphysical sense; not eternal and immutable, but with enough continuity – inertia, to be precise – to generate illusions of essence and a need for roots.” – George Scialabba, “Demos and Sophia: Not a Love Story”

“None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine.” – Stephen King, The Stand (emphasis in original)

“The culture of professionalism and expertise, the bureaucratization of opinion and taste, are not merely mechanisms of social control or a failure of nerve. They are also in part a response to genuine intellectual progress. There’s more to know now than in the ‘30s, and more people have joined the conversation. Perhaps the disappearance of the public intellectual and the eclipse of the classical ideals of wisdom as catholicity of understanding and of citizenship as the capacity to discuss all public affairs are evidences of cultural maturity. Intellectual wholeness is an almost irresistibly attractive ideal; but nowadays too determined a pursuit of it must end in fragmentation and superficiality.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope”

“The beginning of political decency and rationality is to recognize others’ similarity in important respects to oneself; that is, to identify imaginatively. Which is what one does when reading fiction. Literature is, in this sense, practice for civic life.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope”

“Time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.” – Stephen King, The Stand

“In most times, places, and stages of development, people’s abilities in arithmetic consist of the exact quantities ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘many,’ and an ability to estimate larger amounts approximately. Their intuitive physics corresponds to the medieval theory of impetus rather than to Newtonian mechanics (to say nothing of relativity or quantum theory). Their intuitive biology consists of creationism, not evolution, of essentialism, not population genetics, and of vitalism, not mechanistic physiology. Their intuitive psychology is mindbody dualism, not neurobiological reductionism. Their political philosophy is based on kin, clan, tribe, and vendetta, not on the theory of the social contract. Their economics is based on tit-for-tat back-scratching and barter, not on money, interest, rent, and profit. And their morality is a mixture of intuitions of purity, authority, loyalty, conformity, and reciprocity, not the generalized notions of fairness and justice that we identify with moral reasoning.” – Steven Pinker, “The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language”

“Thought is the enemy of flow.” – Vinnie Colaiuta (quoted by Rick Beato in “Why Jeff Beck is Uncopyable”)

“If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.” – Stephen King, The Stand

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance . . . or change. Once such incantatory phrases as ‘we see now through a glass darkly’ and ‘mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform’ are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.” – Stephen King, The Stand (emphasis in original)

“Roads are not passive; they have instrumentality and agency because they direct us – they give us our limits – even when we stray from them.” – Mary Carruthers, “The concept of ductus”

“Children are not invariably conservative, but show conservative tendencies.” – Jess Gropen, et al., “The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English”

“I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide awake people who lived (as far as one could make out) as if they had never learned to use their sense organs: They did not see the things before their eyes, hear the words sounding in their ears, or notice the things they touched or tasted. Some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies. There were others who seemed to live in a most curious condition of consciousness, as if the state they had arrived at today were final, with no possibility of change, or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever. They seemed devoid of all imagination, and they entirely and exclusively depended upon their sense-perception. Chances and possibilities did not exist in their world, and in ‘today’ there was no real ‘tomorrow.’ The future was just the repetition of the past.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”

“A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”

“The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor. One morning I asked him how he was. He replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride, but that in the course of this thoroughgoing sanitary process he had found no trace of God.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”

“The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”

“Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray