The Great Quotes thread

[Bill Ryan]

Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act on it.

Lao Tse (c.500-600 BC)

[Bill Ryan]

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Cicero (46 BC)

[Satori]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act on it.

Lao Tse (c.500-600 BC)

“It’s like deja vu all over again.” Yogi Berra

[Kryztian]

TO The States, or any one of them, or any city of
The States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this
earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

[Mashika]

“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

- Leo Tolstoy

[Bill Ryan]

Unlike most forms of depression, demoralization is a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on the person's life.

John F. Schumaker

[holcaul]

"Political satire became redundant when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize"

- Tom Lehrer (when he was asked why he stopped writing satire)

That's Tom Lehrer of the "Nazi, Schmazi!" fame...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

[Kryztian]

[Bill Ryan]

Everything is alive. Everything is interconnected.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

[Wookie]

"I reject your reality and substitute my own" Adam Savage?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2WFFhicVeXI

Peaceful Journeys

[holcaul]

"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly"

- G.K. Chesterton

[Michel Leclerc]

I open a page at random of the freshly bought Les Feux du Désert [The Fires/Lights of the Desert] – a 3-volume, 1,500-pages collection of spiritual quotes for Roman Catholic monks to meditate on – and read the following quote from La contemplation de Jésus [The Contemplation of Jesus], written by a Andreas Ancona:

Guidé par l’Esprit, le Christ explore les zones secrètes, les cavernes inconnues du cœur de l’homme, d’où émergent les villes de la peur, les fleurs du mal, les cités de l’absurde.

“Guided by the (Holy) Ghost, Christ explores the secret areas, the unknown caves of Man’s heart, from which emerge the towns of fear, the flowers of evil, the cities of the absurd.”

[Ewan]

Posted by Michel Leclerc (here)
I open a page at random of the freshly bought Les Feux du Désert [The Fires/Lights of the Desert] – a 3-volume, 1,500-pages collection of spiritual quotes for Roman Catholic monks to meditate on – and read the following quote from La contemplation de Jésus [The Contemplation of Jesus], written by a Andreas Ancona:

Guidé par l’Esprit, le Christ explore les zones secrètes, les cavernes inconnues du cœur de l’homme, d’où émergent les villes de la peur, les fleurs du mal, les cités de l’absurde.

“Guided by the (Holy) Ghost, Christ explores the secret areas, the unknown caves of Man’s heart, from which emerge the towns of fear, the flowers of evil, the cities of the absurd.”

Just quickly searched for an English translation of the above book. I came up with this - I suspect it may not be correct?



Sorry Bill..

[Michel Leclerc]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act on it.

Lao Tse (c.500-600 BC)

What a perplexing statement, is it not, Bill? What did Lao Tse intend? The "sage" is quite an unsavoury character, is he not? Certainly not a friend of the American Bill of Rights! The great sages we would turn to, would they not rather strengthen the wills, or, more dialectically, reason that by strengthening the wills we strengthen the bones and vice versa? The second sentence nails it even more cruelly.

So either there is an error of translation and the Chinese word should not be translated by "sage" ("archon", maybe? just (half) joking), or Lao Tse’s work recommends attitudes and actions in ways that remind one of Macchiavelli’s Principe. There is a third possibility: given that this text probably predates the acme of turmoil at the time of the warring Kingdoms by centuries, the source text may have been badly damaged in those times, and later reconstructors and copyists (e.g. at the beginning of the Common Era) scrambled over it and adulterated it or patched sentences together from disconnected fragments without understanding any more what had been meant.

Or do I read it wrongly?

[Michel Leclerc]

Posted by Ewan (here)

Posted by Michel Leclerc (here)
I open a page at random of the freshly bought Les Feux du Désert [The Fires/Lights of the Desert] – a 3-volume, 1,500-pages collection of spiritual quotes for Roman Catholic monks to meditate on – and read the following quote from La contemplation de Jésus [The Contemplation of Jesus], written by a Andreas Ancona:

Guidé par l’Esprit, le Christ explore les zones secrètes, les cavernes inconnues du cœur de l’homme, d’où émergent les villes de la peur, les fleurs du mal, les cités de l’absurde.

“Guided by the (Holy) Ghost, Christ explores the secret areas, the unknown caves of Man’s heart, from which emerge the towns of fear, the flowers of evil, the cities of the absurd.”

Just quickly searched for an English translation of the above book. I came up with this - I suspect it may not be correct?



Sorry Bill..

Verrry funny Ewan! I can imagine how Roman Catholic monks, wishing to forget their initiations into man-love, might be motivated by a feminine presence in the desert.

[Michel Leclerc]

Posted by Kryztian (here)

Typical for Marx to say such things.

[Ewan]

Posted by Michel Leclerc (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act on it.

Lao Tse (c.500-600 BC)

So either there is an error of translation and the Chinese word should not be translated by "sage"

I believe you have correctly identified the problem.

It appears to be a blueprint for modern education and mainstream media. Next instalment: what happens when the bellies are not full and they have no knowledge.

[Michel Leclerc]

Dear Bill, dear Ewan, I have to make amends. Allow me to explain.
I was obviously startled by your Lao Tse quote, Bill, because it was/is such an odd combination of concepts that it seemed to be due to a bad translation. (Actually, this quote translation has been made by, or under the aegis of, a Prof. Paul Brians from Washington State University.) And – not to find excuses – my bafflement at the text is not only shared by you, Ewan, but also, to an extent, by a certain Felipe, who states that he does not agree with the ideas expressed. So – might there be something wrong with the "sage"?

Still, I would like to emphasise the importance of my last point in the above comment.
The great classics of Taoism, such as Lao Tse’s Tao Te Ching, but especially the book I am most fond of: Chuang Tsu’s “Inner Chapters” (the book referenced is not only a humble, subtle translation but also very beautifully illustrated, and should be in every “gentleman’s library” – and that of every gentle woman) are all the remnants of a big rescue operation after many centuries of warring before the beginning of the "Common Era" (0 B.C.) undertaken by the "mandarins" of what was a Confucianist state.
To make an extremely blunt comparison: we know more about the Scriptures of early Christianity (which means including the Essenes’ writings one or two centuries “before Christ”), even after Constantine’s creation of the "Christian State" (i.e. the predominantly Christian Roman Empire) which redacted and reconfigured those "first Scriptures", than we know about Taoism’s texts after the creation of the Confucianist Empire.
So it is quite possible that the text of the Tao Te Ching has been doctored with, and it is not so easy to know where and when. (It is, I guess, comparatively easier to know for Chuang Tsu because the text is so idiosyncratic, original, and so clearly the work of an author, with his strong and complex personality that corresponds so well with what the fragments of his biography reveal.)
This judgment of mine, which is provisional because I am not a reader, but rather a decipherer, of the Chinese originals, is based on the very convincing case made by the Swiss sinologist Jean François Billeter for a "redaction" of the traditional texts by later scribes (“later” being practically the last two millennia) who worked for the Emperor.

So, there is only one way to go: that is, to examine the Chinese texts themselves, and doing so, armed with various translations and a good dictionary. (Incidentally, that is what I started to do in 2021, and was interrupted by other priorities, dear Bill, after the 3rd chapter, which the quote happens to be the second half of.)

So, I assembled my translations: I have:

• the "New Translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English” (which is a companion to Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters edition referred to above and is equally beautifully illustrated),

• R.L.Wing’s “The Tao of Power” with the odd subtitle "Lao Tzu’s Classic Guide to Leadership, Influence and Excellence”, which seems to ingratiate it with the management consulting crowd, and

• the hard to come by 1962 “Adrien-Maisonneuve” translation into French by Jacques Lionnet, the great value of which is among other things that it contains "Introduction, traduction, glose, commentaires et notes" —

and I compared translations.
These are the results of my comparison:

• the first one looks very much like Paul Brians’s (your quote's, Bill): it is often confusing as it seems to restrict itself sometimes to poetically translating the Chinese ideogram/logogram, but not really bother about the ultimate meaning of the resulting sentences/verses (in epistemological terms: it does not dialectically relate the meaning of the whole with the meaning of the parts), thence leaving it to the reader to cobble one together [but: the illustrations being gorgeous, they also contain the Chinese text in beautiful calligraphy],

• the second one is a dialectical one: it interprets the individual verses through a clear conception of the meaning of the whole (epitomised in its subtitle, and as such, is related to Macchiavelli’s Principe or Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince (being the future Charles V)), which is excellent, but it arrives at maybe too narrowly "managerial" meanings of the ideograms/logograms [but: it contains the full Chinese text, not as calligraphy, but in its printed form],

• Lionnet’s full comment with the results of an in-depth research on the key ideograms/concepts is extremely useful for understanding both the whole and the parts, but, what is more: his "translation" “translates simultaneously in many ways”, offering for instance not one word but three different approximations of the concept, or even putting a few full verse translations one under the other; this makes it quite difficult to read.. but invaluable as an instrument for study (on the cover, Lionnet put a great quote by Pascal (from his Pensées): La Chine obscurcit, mais il y a la clarté ; cherchez-la (“China makes things obscure, but clarity is there; look for it.”).

So. Last paragraph before a promise.

The three translations stick to something equivalent to "sage"!

• Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English: "the wise”;
• R.L.Wing: “evolved individuals”;
• Jacques Lionnet: “l’homme sage” [“a wise man”].

Aye, there is the rub: the problem arises from the other words, from the description of what the sage does.

And that is precisely what we want to know. What makes this quote important to us now.

So there is only one solution. To examine the Chinese text conscientiously, ideogram per ideogram, being helped on the road by these translations and especially by Lionnet’s most informative one, and also by the supremely excellent Chinese-French dictionary called "le Ricci" – which is ultimately the result of centuries of work done by... the Jesuits.

I guess I will just have to do that.

[Bill Ryan]

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won’t stay flat. They’ve got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can’t imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.

Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the most thought-provoking and inspiring book I have ever read)

[Kryztian]