A garland of quotations LIV
Culled from the finest ark tangents in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
“We know what gentlemen are,” put in the widow. “As well grasp a hedgehog as seek justice from one of them. A fistful of prickles is all you get.”
•Mika Waltari, The Adventurer (1948).
Fox knows many,
Hedgehog one
Solid trick.
•Archilochus, fragment (C7 BC)
I tell you, Madam, it was all a Trick,
He made the Giants first, and then he kill’d them;
As Fox-hunters bring Foxes to a Wood,
And then with Hounds they drive them out again.
•Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb (1730).
The nobility, say the nobles, is an intermediary between the king and the people…. Precisely; just as the hound is the intermediary between the huntsman and the hares.
•Nicholas Chamfort, The Cynic's Breviary (coll. 1902).
Those creatures are the wisest who attain
By surest means the ends at which they aim.
If therefore Jowler finds and kills his hares
Better than Meres supplies committee chairs,
Though one’s a statesman, t’other but a hound,
Jowler in justice would be wiser found.
•Lord Rochester, “A Satyr against Mankind” (1674?).
Don’t you know that we are like the face of the fleeing hare that the hound never sees and the rear of the chasing hound that the hare never looks upon? In like manner no one sees us.
•Ghalib Lakhnavi & Abdullah Bilgrami, Dastan-e Amir Hamza (1871).
I wold my master were an hare,
And all his bokes howndes were,
And I myself a joly hontere…
•“The Schoolboy’s Lament” (C15).
Well, you are getting to be quite a saint, I know; but whip me, if I think you are half as good a fellow as you were a few months ago, when you were always in for a frolic, right or wrong. Why, if you had half the pluck you had last summer, we should have had this hedgehog they call our teacher out of the school long ago.
•Francis Forrester, Dick Duncan, the Story of a Boy Who Loved Mischief, and How He Was Cured of His Evil Habit (1860).
A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t’ attain to. If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee: if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accus’d by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou liv’dst but as a breakfast to the wolf; if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner; wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury: wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be kill’d by the horse; wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seiz’d by the leopard; wert thou a leopard, thou wert germane to the lion and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life. All thy safety were remotion and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? And what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!
•Shakespeare (et al.?), Timon of Athens (1606?).
Timon consulted someone about his children’s education. “Let them,” the man said, “be taught matters they will never understand.”
•Goethe, Individual Points (1824).
Referneces: Archilochus: Guy Davenport, Seven Greeks (New Directions, 1995); Lakhnavi & Bilgrami: trans. Musharraf Ali Farooqi, The Adventures of Amir Hamza (Modern Library, 2007); “Lament”: Douglas Gray, ed., The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose (Clarendon, 1985); Goethe: Maxims and Reflections (Penguin, 1998); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.