by Mardy Grothe
Reading Walden for the first time, I was struck by the parallel between my recent personal choices and Thoreau’s decision to “live deliberately” and “to front only the essential facts of life.” I resonated deeply to his essential goal:
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
Life, of course, doesn’t have marrow; bones do. But Thoreau was writing figuratively, not literally. And by crafting his words in this way, he created an unforgettable image. Reading Thoreau for the first time, I felt as if I had made a new friend.
I embarked on my reading program with enthusiasm, but it was far from a systematic effort. Like the proverbial child in a candy store, I jumped from one treat to another, sampling something from one writer, and then another, and then another. Early in my efforts, an observation from Albert Camus almost seemed to leap off the pages:
One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
The words had an unexpected impact, softening some of the self-criticism I had been feeling for making what seemed like poor choices. But perhaps I hadn’t been so foolish after all. Maybe Camus was right—we best discover what is right for us only after chasing what is wrong. In Sand and Foam, Kahlil Gibran expressed the thought in a slightly different way:
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
A short while later, returning to the writings of Thoreau, I was struck by an 1853 entry he made in his journal:
Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
By relating human lives to the course of a river, Thoreau was suggesting we follow our natural inclinations. Yes, Shakespeare had said pretty much the same thing in “To thine own self be true,” but that line had already become a cliché. The Thoreau observation, on the other hand, seemed new and special. As his words reverberated in my mind, it was becoming clear that I had indeed made a mistake—but recalling the earlier Camus observation, an honest mistake—by trying to walk down a path better designed for another.
A short while later, I felt a similar emotional stirring when I came across an observation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Do not go where the path may lead,
go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
And then again, when—for the first time—I came across this classic passage from Robert Frost’s 1916 poem The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The ideas embedded in these observations seemed so important and profound that I jotted them down on those 3 × 5 index cards that were used back then for library research. Once they were recorded, I thumb-tacked the cards on the walls of my room. As the weeks passed I found myself going back to the quotations again and again for reinforcement and re-inspiration.
As my reading program progressed, I continued this simple recording ritual. After a few months, my dingy little basement room came alive, looking almost as if it had been plastered with a special kind of quotation wallpaper. Thoreau was well represented on my Wall of Quotes:
We are all sculptors and painters,
and our material is our own flesh and bones.
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you,
opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
As was Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Hitch your wagon to a star.
The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine,
until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
and Albert Camus:
There is no sun without shadow,
and it is essential to know the night.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that
within me there lay an invincible summer.
As much as any quotation on my wall, this last observation from Camus described what had been happening to me. My investment in a reflective reading program was paying unexpectedly large—and largely unexpected—dividends. A few months earlier, I was in the depths of a dark winter. Now, however, I was beginning to break through to a deeper level of understanding about myself and what I needed to do with my life.
Years later, I would come across an observation that captured what I had been experiencing. In a 1904 letter to a friend, Franz Kafka asked a provocative rhetorical—and metaphorical—question: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” And then he answered the question this way:
A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.
For the remainder of my college years, I read voraciously. My grades suffered, as did many personal relationships, but I was self-medicating with a drug that appeared to hold great promise. Unlike the street drugs that were beginning to become popular, the substance I was using was legal, free for the taking, and capable of unrivaled mind-expanding effects. Another metaphorical observation, this one from Rudyard Kipling—and also discovered many years later—expressed it perfectly:
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
It’s now been more than four decades since I graduated from college, and I’m still addicted—although these days I simply describe myself as an avid quotation collector. In the same way other people collect coins, or stamps, or butterflies, I collect quotations. It is a passion that will continue for the remainder of my life.
At the end of my college years, I dismantled my Wall of Quotes and secured them in a manila folder that I labeled Words to Live By. As the years passed, the folder became so bloated with new discoveries that I had to use large rubber bands to keep everything together. After a decade or so, the folder and its contents became so tattered and worn that I transferred all the quotations into a computer file designated by the initials WTLB. Since then, my regimen has been pretty much the same. Whenever I find a particularly inspiring quotation in a book or article, I make a notation in the margin. Later, when I’ve finished the reading, I record those observations in the WTLB file on my computer.
All the specimens in my Words to Live By file have inspired or challenged me in some important way. And while many of the quotations are examples of other favorite literary devices—like chiasmus and paradox—a significant number of them, just like the quotations that have appeared so far in this chapter, are analogies, metaphors, and similes. In the remainder of the chapter, I’ve selected many more that have helped me become a better person; perhaps they will be of some benefit to you as well.
I don’t want to get to the end of my life
and find that I have lived just the length of it.
I want to have lived the width of it as well.
DIANE ACKERMAN
Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.
MORTIMER ADLER
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.
AESCHYLUS
Without passion, man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint
which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
Passion is a good thing only as long as we realize that too much of a good thing is bad. Ben Franklin advised: “If passion drives, let reason hold the reins.”
Such as are your habitual thoughts,
such also will be the character of your mind;
for the soul is dyed by the color of the thoughts.
MARCUS AURELIUS
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers,
it shows he is a citizen of the world,
and that his heart is no island cut off from other islands,
but a continent that joins to them.
FRANCIS BACON
This topographical metaphor, from Bacon’s Essays (1597), may have inspired one of literature’s most famous passages, John Donne’s 1624 “No man is an island” sentiment.
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Thomas Jefferson observed similarly: “Do not bite the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.”
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are;
but you must approach each man by the right door.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge,
fitter to bruise than polish.
ANNE BRADSTREET
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant:
if we did not sometimes taste of adversity,
prosperity would not be so welcome.
ANNE BRADSTREET
These two observations come from Meditations Divine and Moral (1664), the only prose work from Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet (of either gender) in the American colonies. She wrote the book for her son Simon, writing in the dedication: “You once desired me to leave something for you in writing that you might look upon when you should see me no more.” Even though Meditations was written nearly 350 years ago, it can be read with great pleasure and much benefit today.
Light tomorrow with today.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.
ROBERT BROWNING
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
PEARL S. BUCK
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal
with the intent of throwing it at someone else;
you are the one who gets burned.
SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA BUDDHA
When a person is down in the world,
an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The rule in carving holds good as to criticism;
never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.
CHARLES BUXTON
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
What we become depends on what we read
after all of the professors have finished with us.
The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with.
Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket;
do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one.
LORD CHESTERFIELD (Philip Dormer Stanhope)
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
FREDERIC CHOPIN
It is better to wear out than to rust out.
There will be time enough for repose in the grave.
RICHARD CUMBERLAND
This observation—likening human life to a machine—has a contemporary feel but goes back over three centuries. Cumberland was a seventeenth-century English theologian. The saying was attributed to him in a 1786 sermon by a fellow Anglican clergyman, George Horne. Theodore Roosevelt reprised the sentiment in an 1898 speech: “Let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”
Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself,
even though you never touch its coat-tails.
CLARENCE DARROW
A man should live with his superiors as he does with his fire;
not too near, lest he burn; not too far off, lest he freeze.
DIOGENES
In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Diogenes advocated a life of self-sufficiency and the repudiation of human luxuries. Here he offers history’s oldest and best advice on “managing your boss.”
Without goals, and plans to reach them,
you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.
FITZHUGH DODSON
We should take care not to make the intellect our god;
it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Make your own bible.
Select and collect all the words and sentences that
in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is.
How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.
MILLICENT FENWICK
Acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming.
B. C. FORBES
He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood.
He who faces no calamity will need no courage.
Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature
which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern,
so wisdom would probably admonish us also
not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
SIGMUND FREUD
If thou hast Knowledge,
let others light their Candle at thine.
THOMAS FULLER, M.D.
Dr. Thomas Fuller—not to be confused with the seventeenth-century English historian by the same name—was a London physician and preacher. He put together two early and important quotation anthologies, the 1731 Introductio ad Prudentiam, and a year later Gnomologia. This is the original version of a saying that is commonly attributed to both Margaret Fuller and Winston Churchill: “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.” Recalling the earlier Diogenes thought about superiors, Fuller also offered this: “I do not recommend to thee the Familiarity of great Men; it’s a fire that often scorches.”
One does not discover new continents
without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
ANDRÉ GIDE
We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Goethe was writing in the late 1700s, when most people believed the devil was a real entity, capable of seizing control and causing us to do evil things, just as Satan convinced Eve to taste of the forbidden apple. In the 1970s, comedian Flip Wilson parodied this view with his signature line, “The devil made me do it.”
Happiness is as a butterfly which,
when pursued, is always beyond our grasp,
but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving.
To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind
and sometimes against it—
but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
Our acts make or mar us; we are the children of our own deeds.
VICTOR HUGO
Once you wake up thought in a man,
you can never put it to sleep again.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven,
spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought,
and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
WASHINGTON IRVING
In matters of principle, stand like a rock;
in matters of taste, swim with the current.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
As far as we can discern, the sol
e purpose of human existence
is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
CARL JUNG
Let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
JOHN KEATS
A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner,
so if one’s life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself.
LOUIS L’AMOUR
Peter Ustinov offered a similar thought: “Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.”
One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature
without having that nature recoil upon itself.
JACK LONDON
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
JACK LONDON, his “credo,”
said two months before his death
Never mind trifles.
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
These words, inspired by a 1764 Voltaire observation, come from a character in “The Story of Brother Bernardus,” in Longfellow’s 1839 Hyperion. By likening the lives of people to the tools of a blacksmith, he suggests that human beings can strike with force on the world around them or stand firm under the force of the blows they receive.
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains