Tag: Quotations

Echoes through time

Echoes through time: I accord you the privilege

Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit. If I thought you were sent by the Creator, I might be induced to think you had a right to dispose of me. Do not misunderstand me, but understand fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I choose. The one who has a right to dispose of it is the one who has created it. I claim a right to live on my land and accord you the privilege to return to yours.

Chief Joseph (1840 – 1904), Speech from 1876 rejecting demands to lead his people onto a reservation.

Image: Edward S. Curtis/Library of Congress

Echoes through time

Echoes through time: the lure of popularity

You cannot hope to be a scholar. But what you can do is to curb arrogance; what you can do is to rise above pleasures and pains; you can be superior to the lure of popularity; you can keep your temper with the foolish and ungrateful, yes, even care for them.

Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (8.8)

Photo by Gary Ellis on Unsplash

Seneca
Echoes through time

Echoes through time: even self-restraint can comb its hair

The rough clothes, the rank growth of hair and beard, the sworn hatred of silverware, the pallet laid on the ground: all these and any other perverse form of self-aggrandisement are things you should avoid…

The life we endeavour to live should be better than the general practice, not contrary to it…

Philosophy demands self-restraint, not self-abnegation – and even self-restraint can comb its hair.

Seneca (4 BC – AD 65),  Moral Letters to Lucilius (5.2 – 5.5)

Worth a re-post in these locked down times.

Viktor Frankl
Echoes through time

Echoes through time: a striving struggle for a worthwhile goal

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Viktor E. Frankl (1905 – 1997), Man’s Search for Meaning (p110)

Note: the translation I have is “striving and struggling”, but I’ve also seen it translated as “What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather a striving struggle for a worthwhile goal.” which I think I prefer.

Echoes through time

Echoes through time: It is not bodily hunger … but ambition.

A bull is filled up by only a few acres of pasturage; a single wood suffices for more than one elephant; yet a human being feeds upon land and sea. Why is that? Has nature given us such an insatiable maw that although the bodies we are given are of modest size, we yet surpass the largest, most ravenous eaters of the animal world? That is not the case … It is not bodily hunger that runs up the bill but ambition. Therefore let us regard those who, as Sallust says, “heed the belly” as belonging to the race of animals rather than of humans.

Seneca (4 BC – AD 65),  Moral Letters to Lucilius (60.2 – 4)