http://home.iitk.ac.in/~vinit/folder/Albert%20Einstien/albert_einstein_the_world_as_i_see_it_txt.pdf
Congratulations to Dr. Solf
I am delighted to be able to offer you, Dr. Solf, the heartiest congratulations,
the congratulations of Lessing College, of which you have become an
indispensable pillar, and the congratulations of all who are convinced of the
need for close contact between science and art and the public which is hungry
for spiritual nourishment.
You have not hesitated to apply your energies to a field where there are no
laurels to be won, but quiet, loyal work to be done in the interests of the
general standard of intellectual and spiritual life, which is in peculiar danger
to-day owing to a variety of circumstances. Exaggerated respect for athletics,
an excess of coarse impressions which the complications of life through the
technical discoveries of recent years has brought with it, the increased severity
of the struggle for existence due to the economic crisis, the brutalization of
political life--all these factors are hostile to the ripening of the character and
the desire for real culture, and stamp our age as barbarous, materialistic, and
superficial. Specialization in every sphere of intellectual work is producing an
everwidening gulf between the intellectual worker and the non-specialist,
which makes it more difficult for the life of the nation to be fertilized and
enriched by the achievements of art and science.
But contact between the intellectual and the masses must not be lost. It is
necessary for the elevation of society and no less so for renewing the strength
of the intellectual worker; for the flower of science does not grow in the
desert. For this reason you, Herr Solf, have devoted a portion of your
energies to Lessing College, and we are grateful to you for doing so. And we
wish you further success and happiness in your work for this noble cause.
Of Wealth
I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The
example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine
ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts
its owners irresistibly to abuse it.
Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of
Carnegie?
Teachers and Pupils
An address to children
(The principal art of the teacher is to awaken the joy in creation
and knowledge.)
My dear Children,
I rejoice to see you before me to-day, happy youth of a sunny and fortunate
land.
Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work
of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labour in
every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance
in order that you may receive it, honour it, add to it, and one day faithfully
hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the
permanent things which we create in common.
If you always keep that in mind you will find a meaning in life and work and
acquire the right attitude towards other nations and ages.
Paradise Lost
As late as the seventeenth century the savants and artists of all Europe were
so closely united by the bond of a common ideal that co-operation between
them was scarcely affected by political events. This unity was further
strengthened by the general use of the Latin language.
To-day we look back at this state of affairs as at a lost paradise. The passions
of nationalism have destroyed this community of the intellect, and the Latin
language, which once united the whole world, is dead. The men of learning
have become the chief mouthpieces of national tradition and lost their sense of
an intellectual commonwealth.
Nowadays we are faced with the curious fact that the politicians, the practical
men of affairs, have become the exponents of international ideas. It is they
who have created the League of Nations.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Sunday, June 10, 2018
《Letters To a Young Poet》 by Rainer Maria Rilke
LETTER ONE
http://www.mixolydian.org/goliard/library/rilke/rilke1.html
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have you believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple, "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.
For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.
after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from the outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
... ... ... ...
LETTER SIX
http://www.mixolydian.org/goliard/library/rilke/rilke6.html
... yes even if, outside of any position, you had merely sought some light and independent contact with society, this feeling of constraint would not have been spared you.- It is so everywhere; but that is no reason for fear or sorrow; if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad like that and happy,—and if you think of your childhood you live among them again, among the solitary children. and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.
... ... ... ...
LETTER SEVEN
http://www.mixolydian.org/goliard/library/rilke/rilke7.html
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?), It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
http://www.mixolydian.org/goliard/library/rilke/rilke1.html
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have you believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple, "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.
For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.
after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from the outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
... ... ... ...
LETTER SIX
http://www.mixolydian.org/goliard/library/rilke/rilke6.html
... yes even if, outside of any position, you had merely sought some light and independent contact with society, this feeling of constraint would not have been spared you.- It is so everywhere; but that is no reason for fear or sorrow; if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad like that and happy,—and if you think of your childhood you live among them again, among the solitary children. and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.
... ... ... ...
LETTER SEVEN
http://www.mixolydian.org/goliard/library/rilke/rilke7.html
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?), It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
《On the Shortness of Life》 by Seneca
In this mode of life much that is worth studying awaits you: the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, knowledge of how to live and to die, and deep repose.
The plight of all preoccupied people is wretched, but most wretched is the plight of those who labor under preoccupations that are not even their own, whose sleep schedule is regulated by somebody else's, who walk at somebody else's pace, and who are under instructions in that freest of all activities-loving and hating.
So, when you see a man repeatedly taking up the robe of office, or a name well known in public, don't envy him: those trappings are bought at the cost of life. For one year to be dated by their name, they'll waste all their own years. Life deserts some of them amid their first struggles, before the arduous climb up to the peak of their ambition. Some, after they've clambered up through a thousand indignities to arrive at the crowning dignity, are assailed by the wretched thought that all their toil has been for an inscription on an epitaph.
All the time while they plunder and are plundered and break in on each other's rest and make each other miserable, life is without profit, without pleasure, without any progress of mind.
Thursday, August 10, 2017
The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
(Special thanks to S.C. who has given me many good books including this one.)
"When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it; you can either accept it or resent it. what really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance." p7
Saturday, April 23, 2016
《Man for Himself》by Erich Fromm
Chapter I The Problem
A spirit of pride and optimism has distinguished Western culture in the last few centuries: pride in reason as man's instrument for his understanding and mastery of nature; optimism in the fulfillment of the fondest hopes of mankind, the achievement of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
While creating new and better means for mastering nature, he has become enmeshed in a network of those means and has lost the vision of the end which alone gives them significance—man himself. While becoming the master of nature, he has become the slave of the machine which his own hands built. With all his knowledge about matter, he is ignorant with regard to the most important and fundamental questions of human existence: what man is, how he ought to live, and how the tremendous energies within man can be released and used productively.
But since man can not live without values and norms, this relativism makes him an easy prey for irrational value systems. He reverts to a position which the Greek Enlightenment, Christianity, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had already overcome. The demands of the State, the enthusiasm for magic qualities of powerful leaders, powerful machines, and material success become the sources for his norms and value judgments.
Indeed, there is another alternative. Valid ethical norms can be formed by man's reason and by it alone. ... ... The great tradition of humanistic ethical thought has laid the foundations for value systems based on man's autonomy and reason. These systems were built on the premise that in order to know what is good or bad for man one has to know the nature of man.
I have written this book with the intention of reaffirming the validity of humanistic ethics, to show that our knowledge of human nature does not lead to ethical relativism, but, on the contrary, to the conviction that the sources of norms for ethical conduct are to be found in man's nature itself; that moral norms are based no upon man's inherent qualities, and that their violation results in mental and emotional disintegration. ... ... Not self-renunciation nor selfishness but self-love, not the negation of the individual but the affirmation of his truly human self, are the supreme value of humanistic ethics. If man is to have confidence in values, he must know himself and the capacity of his nature for goodness and productiveness.
A spirit of pride and optimism has distinguished Western culture in the last few centuries: pride in reason as man's instrument for his understanding and mastery of nature; optimism in the fulfillment of the fondest hopes of mankind, the achievement of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
While creating new and better means for mastering nature, he has become enmeshed in a network of those means and has lost the vision of the end which alone gives them significance—man himself. While becoming the master of nature, he has become the slave of the machine which his own hands built. With all his knowledge about matter, he is ignorant with regard to the most important and fundamental questions of human existence: what man is, how he ought to live, and how the tremendous energies within man can be released and used productively.
But since man can not live without values and norms, this relativism makes him an easy prey for irrational value systems. He reverts to a position which the Greek Enlightenment, Christianity, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had already overcome. The demands of the State, the enthusiasm for magic qualities of powerful leaders, powerful machines, and material success become the sources for his norms and value judgments.
Indeed, there is another alternative. Valid ethical norms can be formed by man's reason and by it alone. ... ... The great tradition of humanistic ethical thought has laid the foundations for value systems based on man's autonomy and reason. These systems were built on the premise that in order to know what is good or bad for man one has to know the nature of man.
I have written this book with the intention of reaffirming the validity of humanistic ethics, to show that our knowledge of human nature does not lead to ethical relativism, but, on the contrary, to the conviction that the sources of norms for ethical conduct are to be found in man's nature itself; that moral norms are based no upon man's inherent qualities, and that their violation results in mental and emotional disintegration. ... ... Not self-renunciation nor selfishness but self-love, not the negation of the individual but the affirmation of his truly human self, are the supreme value of humanistic ethics. If man is to have confidence in values, he must know himself and the capacity of his nature for goodness and productiveness.
Quotes cited by Erich Fromm in《Man for Himself》
Be ye lamps unto yourselves.
Be your own reliance.
Hold to the truth within yourselves
as to the only lamp.
~ Buddha
True words always seem paradoxical but no other form of teaching can take its place.
~ Laozi
Who then are the true philosophers?
Those who are lovers of the vision of truth.
~ Plato
My people are destroyed by the lack of knowledge;
because thou hast rejected knowledge
I will also reject thee.
~ Hosea
If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither seems very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is so seldom discovered; for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labour, how could it be possible that it should be neglected almost by everybody? But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.
~ Spinoza
Be your own reliance.
Hold to the truth within yourselves
as to the only lamp.
~ Buddha
True words always seem paradoxical but no other form of teaching can take its place.
~ Laozi
Who then are the true philosophers?
Those who are lovers of the vision of truth.
~ Plato
My people are destroyed by the lack of knowledge;
because thou hast rejected knowledge
I will also reject thee.
~ Hosea
If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither seems very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is so seldom discovered; for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labour, how could it be possible that it should be neglected almost by everybody? But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.
~ Spinoza
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (as told through John G. Neihardt) © 1961
Preface
... his real interest was in "the things of the Other World."
His chief purpose was to "save his Great Vision for men."
I. The Offering of the Pipe
But if the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.
II. Early Boyhood
Sometimes dreams are wise than walking.
This is a good day to die.
III. The Great Vision
The boys of my people began very young to learn the ways of men, and no one taught us; we just learned by doing what we saw, and we were warriors at a time when boys now are like girls.
Then as we walked, there was a heaped up cloud ahead that changed into a tepee, and a rainbow was the open door of it; and through the door I saw six old man sitting in a row.
... ... I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth, of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth.
I know now what this meant, that the bison were the gift of a good spirit and were our strength, but we should lose them, and from the same good spirit we must find another strength.
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
I was sad because my mother and my father didn't seem to know I had been so far away.
XVII. The First Cure
You have noticed that everything an Indian does in in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the cycle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and there were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
XVIII. The Powers of the Bison and the Elk
It was the power of the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.
nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.
XIX Across the Big Water
In my great vision, when I stood at the center of the world, the two men from the east had brought me the daybreak-star herb and they had told me to drop it on the earth; and where it touched the gourd it took root and bloomed four-rayed. It was the herb of understanding.
They (the Wasichus, westerners) had forgotten that the earth was their mother. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.
XXIII Bad Trouble Coming
It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost.
XXV The End of the Dream
When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
Author's Postscript
"Again, and maybe the last time on this earth, I recall the great vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, and shielding tree!"
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