Category: Lit & Crit

“The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2

“To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2

“Fiction is simulated gossip. You’re a witness to the secret foibles of other people. They just happen not to exist.” – Steven Pinker, The Seed Salon

“Storytelling, in general, has a moral use. To be in the throes of a story, to have one’s emotions provoked by another’s story, is not quite ethics, but it’s kind of the shadowlife of ethics. We train children by telling them stories. We try to get them to feel their way into other lives, and that itself is something. If we had no capacity for that there would be no hope. It would just be all rules that you would follow for fear of being punished if you didn’t. And that doesn’t amount to becoming a moral agent.” – Rebecca Goldstein, The Seed Salon

“One problem for anyone like me who believes in a fixed human nature, including a fixed moral sense, is to explain how human behavior could have changed so radically over a few centuries or millennia. Much of the world has seen an end to slavery, to genocide for convenience, to torture as a routine form of criminal punishment, to capital punishment for property crimes, to human sacrifice, to rape as the spoils of war, to the ownership of women. We seem to be turning into a nicer species.” – Steven Pinker, The Seed Salon

“Morality, at heart, is the idea that one’s own perspective is not privileged—that the only coherent code of behavior takes a disinterested perspective that applies equally to oneself and to others.” – Steven Pinker, The Seed Salon

“There is something in grasping another person in the full complexity of their own personhood that entails another domain of facts, facts about rights and obligations. There are ways that you can and can’t morally treat a subject of experience, especially if that subject is a person.” – Rebecca Goldstein, The Seed Salon

“To subjugate yourself to the objective truth is a humbling experience.” – Rebecca Goldstein, The Seed Salon

“To expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is, why day is day, night night, and time is time, were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 2.2

“So oft it chances in particular men that, for some vicious mole of nature in them, as in their birth,—wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin,—by the o’ergrowth of some complexion, oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason; or by some habit, that too much o’er-leavens the form of plausible manners;—that these men,—carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,—their virtues else,—be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo,—shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.4

“When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“This above all,—to thine ownself be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be: for loan oft loses both itself and friend; and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportion’d thought his act.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 1.3

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 5.1

“We that have good wits have much to answer for.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 5.1

“That woman that cannot make her fault her husband’s occasion, let her never nurse her child herself, for she will breed it like a fool.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.1

“Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and it will out at the keyhole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.1

“Men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.1

“To have seen much, and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.1

“There are two ways in which the identification of the law of nature with the rule of man’s unfallen, or his regenerate, condition may tend to radical conclusions. To associate the natural with the unfallen state is to approach the general type of thought now described as primitivistic. To associate it with a regenerate condition presents, on the other hand, some affinity with the type of thought known as perfectibilitarian. In the eighteenth century these two types were to furnish, separately and together, the dominant modes of radical thinking. Discontent with the existing social order issued in the cry of ‘back to nature,’ or in the cry of ‘onward to perfection.’ Then the happy discovery was made that the two things were really identical: in order to go onward to perfection one had only to go back to nature for one’s rule. But before this blessed state of confusion could be achieved dogma must have disappeared or have been interpreted so figuratively that nothing but the smudged outline of its pattern persisted. In some of the radicals of the Puritan revolution these processes are seen at work.” – A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism & Liberty

“Omittance is not quittance.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 3.5

“All’s brave that youth mounts and folly drives.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 3.4

“Was is not is.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 3.4 (emphases in original)

“When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It 3.3