Daily Quotes compiled by 7artes
С нас бе от Оксенфорд един школар, във логиката задълбал със жар. Кобилата му беше само кости, самият той – изпосталял от пости и винаги умислен и навъсен, загърнал се във плаща си окъсан… До одъра си имал наредени двайстина книги – черни и червени, които и за купища пари, и за дворци не би сменил дори.Той беше философ – бедняк последен, но на Платон и Аристотел предан… Четеше с прилежание, със ум, не вдигаше излишен, празен шуми всяко кратко, ясно изречение напълваше със смисъл и значение. Готов бе да живее във забрава - да учи само и да поучава. Джефри Чосър, ―Кентърбърийски разкази‖ (след 1368)
Човешки братя, подир нас дошли, не ни осъждайте със поглед строг, че който за нещастник го боли, към него милостив ще бъде Бог. Пет-шест на брой пред вас висим – жесток бе жребият ни: скапа се плътта (а беше ни до вчера 1
съкпа тя!), на пепел всеки скелет се разпада… С насмешка не ровете пепелта - молете за душите ни пощада!
Франсоа Вийон, ―Баладична епитафия на обесените‖
А
одеянието
й
богато
не
се
описва
с
никакви
слова. Накичена със бисери и злато, намираше тя време след лова да учи чужда реч, а при това четеше книги, за да проумее как до смъртта си с вдигната глава достойно и почтено да живее.
Джефри Чосър, ―Кентърбърийски разкази‖
…Фортуна свойте дверизатръшна, та земята потрепери.Вий трябва да сте винаги нащрек. Не вярвайте на нейните химери. Помнете тези примери навек.
Джефри Чосър, ―Кентърбърийски разкази‖
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Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was.
J. M. Barrie, ―Peter Pan‖
Because the correct and the mistaken don’t exist in the historical event… things simply happen.
Antonio Negri, ―Goodbye Mr. Socialism‖
Three days, three, I’ve fasted three - what is bread to such as me? My twenty years shall prevail, my twenty year are up for sale. If nobody wants to buy, devil take them then, say I. With a pure heart I would steal, if it needed, I would kill. Catch me, hang me on a tree - earth is blessed that covers me; grave-grass on my heart yet grows, heart as lovely as a rose.
Attila Jozsef, ―With a Pure Heart,‖ 1925, www.libri.hu 3
…a genuine theoretician of literature must bring within the scope of his considerations areas other than literature: his specialty, if the word can still be used, is not to be a specialist. Conversely (who knows?), an interest in literature is perhaps a requirement for specialization in the human sciences.
Tzvetan Todorov, ―Mikhail Bakhtin: the Dialogical Principle‖
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Carl Rogers
Man, he [Protagoras] says, is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence of things that are not...
Plato, "Theaetetus"
...all things are the offspring of flux and motion... Plato, ―Theaetetus‖ 4
Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps, / Not on the ground but on the heads of men
Plato, ―Symposium‖
...there arises a general reflection, that there is no one selfexistent thing, but everything is becoming and in relation...
Plato, ―Theaetetus‖
―You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream.‖
Plato, ―Theaetetus‖
―The cities of a world of nations,/ With all their manners, minds, and fashions,/ He saw and knew.‖
Homer, ―Odyssey‖ 5
What is ―the danger of false anomalies:‖ ―the tendency to wrongly regard certain phenomena as anomalous or mutually incompatible, on the basis of inaccurate preconceptions of what constitutes the norm.‖
Judith Ryder, ―The Career and Writings of Demetrius Kydones. A Study of Fourteenth-Century Byzantine Politics, Religion and Society‖
Нека бъдат пет не брой нещата, чрез които душата говори истината посредством потвърждаване и отричане. Те са изкуство, наука, разсъдливост, мъдрост, ум; защото в предположението и мнението е възможно душата да се заблуди.
Аристотел, "Никомахова етика"
...G. T. Denis writes, ―...the average Byzantine letter was about as concrete, informative, and personal as the modern, massproduced greeting card.‖ 6
A. R. Littlewood, ―A Statistical Survey of the Incidence of Repeated Quotations in Selected Byzantine Letter-Writers‖
In both late antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages, a training in grammar and rhetoric was the mark of the learned man, who normally belonged to a very limited social elite. Philosophy was always an optional subject, perhaps studied superficially by many, but in depth by only a few.
Robert Browning, ―The Teachers‖ in ―The Byzantines‖ Ed. Guglielmo Cavallo.
In the course of the Byzantine period, the distinction between the domains of the grammarian and the rhetorician, and to a lesser extent between those of the rhetorician and the philosopher, became blurred, and the same teacher is often found giving instruction in two subjects.
Robert Browning, ―The Teachers‖ in ―The Byzantines‖ Ed. Guglielmo Cavallo. 7
Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
Steve Jobs, Commencement address delivered on June 12, 2005.
Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
P.D. James, (More on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rulesfor-writing-fiction-part-one)
When discourse in conceived as a source of pleasure and change, it structures relationships in ways that differ from relationships of unity. In a relationship structured around the materiality and multiplicity of writing, the participant partners are imagined as subjectivities affected by change and differentiation. Imagined alternatively as author and reader, the friends assume discursive roles that are regulated by difference: the author/friend is one that is able to transform and refashion 8
while producing his flow of discourse; the reader/friend is one that is subjected to and altered by the pleasures of his friend’s discourse and is open and receptive to its continuous refashioning.
Stratis Papaioannou, ―Language Games, Not the Soul’s Beliefs. Michael Italikos to Theodoros Prodromos, on Friendship and Writing‖
I am a sort of chimera of my age. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 250
Viewed historically, the classical tradition must be defined as the exploitation of the heritage left to us by the two great civilizations of Greece and Rome and the influence which that exploitation was able to exert.
Robert Bolgar, ―The Classical Tradition: Legend and Reality‖
9
It is time that we decided what we mean by the classical tradition. We are the servants of that tradition. But what do we serve? Are we interested in the whole of Graeco-Roman culture in so far as it has survived, or only in a small part of it, which may however be its most valuable part?
Robert Bolgar, ―The Classical Tradition: Legend and Reality‖
In a word, Aristotle needed to add a fourth element to the three factors in the speech act which he identifies in chapter one: not only speaker, speech, and audience, but also occasion.
George Kennedy, ―The Classical Tradition in Rhetoric‖
The classical tradition was never completely disrupted in Byzantium and therefore should be considered more as survival than as revival.
Herbert Hunger, ―The Classical Tradition in Byzantine Literature: the Importance of Rhetoric‖
10
One could say that, creativity aside, many scholars have felt the impulse to tell stories and have regretted being unable to do so – and that this is why the desk drawers of many university professors are full of bad unpublished novels.
Umberto Eco, ―Writing from Left to Right‖
Narrative is governed by the Latin rule, ―Rem tene, verba sequentur‖ – ―Stick with the subject and the words will follow‖...
Umberto Eco, ―Writing from Left to Right‖
Narrative is, first and foremost, a cosmological affair. To narrate something, you start as a sort of demiurge who creates a world – a world that must be as precise as possible, so that you can move around in it with total confidence.
Umberto Eco, ―Writing from Left to Right‖
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Knowledge is central to the way in which rhetoric as a discipline, whether formal in some sense or not, is conceived of.
Tobias Reinhardt, ―Rhetoric and Knowledge‖
The Greek language has, built into it, a surprisingly large number of ways of saying ―if.‖ The System of progymnasmata can be regarded as in some ways a codification of this speculative spirit.
George Kustas, ―The Function and Evolution of Byzantine Rhetoric‖
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