A garland of quotations XXXVIII

Culled from the finest wanderers in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday

For, let me tell you in passing, I find it very useful, especially when one is travelling, to look about one occasionally.
•Rudolf Erich Raspe, Baron Münchausen (1785).

But the mechanics weren’t the worst of my problems—I also had to contend with the spirit world.
•U Sam Oeur, Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005).

To drift is not surrender.
The backwards call of a bird
is the sound of another bird.
•Yanyi, “Migrants” (2022).

It is possible to persuade lions and leopards and other wild beasts to speak with human voices, but not a philosopher against his will.
•Vita Secundi Philosophi (C2?).

The mind that has lost, through its philosophy, the power of feeling this emotion of awe in such scenes, has sunk, not risen. Its possessor has made himself inferior, not superior, to the rest of his species, by having paralyzed one of his susceptibilities of pleasure. To him an eclipse is only curious and wonderful; to others it is sublime.
•Jacob Abbott, Alexander the Great (1849).

Test all metaphysical conclusions by [Bertrand] Russell and [John E.] McTaggart.
•Francis Younghusband, notebook reminder (1912).

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.
•Orson Scott Card, Xenocide (1991).

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind,
•Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert George Gregory” (1919).

Bion…said that boys throw stones at frogs for fun, but the frogs died not for fun at all, but in earnest.
•Plutarch, Moralia (C1).

The Layman was sitting in his thatched cottage one day. “Difficult, difficult, difficult,” he suddenly exclaimed, “[like trying] to scatter ten measures of sesame seeds all over a tree.!”
“Easy, easy, easy,” returned Mrs. P‘ang, “just like touching your feet to the ground when you get out of bed.”
“Neither difficult nor easy,” said Ling-chao. “On the hundred grass-tips, the Patriarch’s meaning.”
•Yü Ti, The Recorded Sayings of Layman P‘ang (809).

References: Yanyi: Dream of the Divided Field (One World, 2022); Vita: Wm. Hansen, ed., An Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature (IN UP, 1998); Younghusband: Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (HarperCollins, 1994); Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole (Macmillan, 1919); Plutarch: Moral Essays (Penguin, 1971); Yü Ti: trans. Sasaki, Iriya, & Fraser (Wetherhill, 1971); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use. If you prefer Monday releases, please let me know; it just seemed like everyone posted on Monday.