Illustrated Latin Quotes

I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

I suppose you mean Camilla?" "Yes, that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get through it." "I have never read it." "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

Grief is a swarm of feelings that swirls inside of you for your whole life; it's a weight that settles around the eyes, transforms the shape of a laugh. It is sadness mixed with a furious rage churning in an ocean of helplessness. It's an old word, dating back to the 1200s, and its latin roots mean to "make heavy." The first six definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary describe various types of hardship or physical pain. The seventh definition makes me think grief is the correct term for the storm of emotion I associate with my mom's mental illness. "Mental pain, distress, or sorry...deep or violent sorrow, caused by loss or trouble; a keen or bitter feeling of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for mishap to oneself or others.

We shall conclude this chapter by a melancholy truth, which obtrudes itself on the reluctant mind; that even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded, or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdoms, it must still be acknowledged, that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels. During the ages of ignorance which followed the subversion of the Roman empire in the West, the bishops of the Imperial city extended their dominion over the laity as well as clergy of the Latin church. The fabric of superstition which they had erected, and which might long have defied the feeble efforts of reason, was at length assaulted by a crowd of daring fanatics, who from the twelfth to the sixteenth century assumed the popular character of reformers.

THE CONTRAST OF South and North Korea, and of the United States and Latin America, illustrates a general principle. Inclusive economic institutions foster economic activity, productivity growth, and economic prosperity. Secure private property rights are central, since only those with such rights will be willing to invest and increase productivity. A businessman who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated, or entirely taxed away will have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations. But such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. In

Even for one who possesses a natural facility for acquiring foreign tongues, the learning of Russian is by no means an easy task. Though it is essentially an Aryan language like our own, and contains only a slight intermixture of Tartar words,—such as bashlyk (a hood), kalpak (a night-cap), arbuz (a water-melon), etc.—it has certain sounds unknown to West-European ears, and difficult for West-European tongues, and its roots, though in great part derived from the same original stock as those of the Graeco-Latin and Teutonic languages, are generally not at all easily recognised. As an illustration of this, take the Russian word otets. Strange as it may at first sight appear, this word is merely another form of our word father, of the German vater, and of the French pere. The syllable ets is the ordinary Russian termination denoting the agent, corresponding to the English and German ending er, as we see in such words as—kup-ets (a buyer), plov-ets (a swimmer), and many others. The root ot is a mutilated form of vot, as we see in the word otchina (a paternal inheritance), which is frequently written votchina. Now vot is evidently the same root as the German vat in Vater, and the English fath in father. Quod erat demonstrandum.

For Plato, of course, there existed beyond the realm of ordinary sense-experience the world of Forms, for which outward, earthly appearances—including symbols such as language itself—were mere and meager representations. Words were simply incapable of accurately describing or illustrating this divine realm. The logic and reason of the Aristotelians occupied its true home only in the sphere of sense-experience—in what Pletho had nonchalantly dismissed as the world of oysters and embryos. The Aristotelian philosophy on which western Christianity depended therefore offered a misguided point of departure in any quest for inexpressible truths and eternal verities. The clumsy wordings of dogmas, liturgies, creeds: such things were mere shadow puppets on the wall of the Platonic cave; debates framed by Aristotelian philosophy could never hope to approach or capture their proper forms. On the other hand, Plato’s philosophy, with its belief in a unity embracing scattered differences, offered a more promising chance to find a concord between the Greeks and the Latins. Bessarion and Traversari duly worked out a compromise on the fraught question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit. They came up with the argument that since the saints in both the East and West had been inspired by the same Holy Spirit, it scarcely mattered whether this Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son or simply from the Father. It was, after all, merely a matter of semantics—of whether one believed that “from” (εκ) and “through” (διά) meant the same thing. As Bessarion put it in the context of another dispute, the two parties “agreed in substance and differed only in words.

Using the delicate cloth like a handkerchief to protect the brittle pages, she opened the first book she had unearthed: On Dragons. "Oh, how wonderful!" she murmured to herself, gazing at the wildly colored illustrations of giant reptiles, winged and breathing fire. The Chaucerian English was going to take some work to decipher. She would have to see what reference texts she could find in the collection to help her work out the captions, but for now, the pictures fascinated her. The next page showed a silver-armored knight astride a galloping white steed. Armed with a lance, he was shown charging at the hideous, horned dragon that loomed over him, its black, batlike wings outstretched. The knight in the picture had a winged ally of his own, however. In the sky above him hovered none other than St. Michael the Archangel again, her old friend from the duke's family chapel. Come to think of it, she mused, wasn't that white Maltese cross on the little knight's pennant another detail she had noticed in the chapel? She turned the page and stopped at the next colorful picture of a dragon holding its egg in its claws. Some sort of curious symbol was depicted inside the rounded contours of the egg. Kate furrowed her brow and leaned closer, studying the symbol on the dragon's egg. A tingle of faint recognition ran down her spine. I've seen this before. The symbol showed an eight-spoked wagon wheel, with a flaming torch in the center. Beneath the wheel was the Latin motto, Non serviam. Easy enough to translate: "I will not serve.

And if it be asked why the priest says Mass in Latin, an unknown tongue, instead of in the vernacular, we reply: The Holy Mass is not a sermon, it is not intended for the instruction of the people; it is the offering for them of the sacrifice of the New Testament. There are good reasons why this should be done in a language which never can change. Some languages are called dead, others living; the former are no longer in common use and are consequently unchanged; the latter are the modes of speech of the various peoples and are subject to constant variation. If the Mass were said in one of the living languages, there would be great risk that, as the meaning of words changed, the original significance of the formulas would change also, and against this danger the Church must guard. As the integral part of religion cannot be altered, so the language of religion must ever remain the same. The unity of doctrine in the Catholic Church throughout the world is beautifully illustrated by the identity of the languages she employs. In whatever part of the globe the Catholic finds himself, there the great mystery of the faith he professes is celebrated in the same manner, in the same language. And lest the ordinary Christian should reman in ignorance of the meaning of the Latin prayers of the Mass, holy Church in her maternal care for her children, provides that in the prayer-books (i.e. the hand-held missals used by the laity to follow the Mass) they should be translated into the vulgar tongue of each country.

What do we mean by the term illustration? There is no easy answer. From the Romans to the Enlightenment, the Latin analogy “ut pictura poesis” (as is painting so is poetry) was used by philosophers to suggest a parallel between literature and the fine arts, between visual and verbal modes of communication.

Orate, fratres,’ resumed the priest aloud as he faced the empty benches, extending and reclasping his hands in a gesture of appeal to all men of good-will. And turning again towards the altar, he continued his prayer in a lower tone, while Vincent began to mutter a long Latin sentence in which he eventually got lost. Now it was that the yellow sunbeams began to dart through the windows; called, as it were, by the priest, the sun itself had come to mass, throwing golden sheets of light upon the left-hand wall, the confessional, the Virgin’s altar, and the big clock.

It’s hard to imagine a time when French writers were uncertain about the legitimacy and importance of their language, but that was the case in the sixteenth century. French was considered appropriate for vulgar (that is, popular) writing or for old medieval poetic forms such as rondeaux or madrigals, but not for “higher” forms of writing, higher learning or the sciences, which were still the exclusive domain of Latin. While François I didn’t regulate French in any way, his policies did legitimize the efforts of the many artists, poets, savants and printers who were trying to dump Latin and make French prestigious by inserting it into the language of state administration, universities and spheres of higher learning such as medicine and poetry. In some ways writers led the way in this movement. The most militant anti-Latin lobby in France was a group of poets originally called the Brigade who were soon to choose a more poetic name: La Pléiade. They were up-and-coming writers who wanted to position themselves as a literary avant-garde. Their manifesto, Déffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse (Defence and Illustration of the French Language), was an indictment of Latin in favour of French. It was published in 1549, ten years after the publication of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. Signed by the poet Joachim Du Bellay, it begged poets to use French for the new-found forms of classic Greek and Latin literature—the ode, the elegy, and comedy and tragedy (these were, of course, very old forms, but they were only just being rediscovered after having been forgotten for more than a thousand years). In a chapter titled “Exhortation to Frenchmen,” Du Bellay wonders, “Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why do we use foreign languages as if we were ashamed to use our own?…Thou must not be ashamed of writing in thy own language.” The debate is surprisingly similar to the twentieth-century one in which French musicians wondered if it was possible to make rock ’n’ roll in their own language. François I’s policies definitely added weight to the case made by Du Bellay and the Pléiade poets. While Du Bellay’s Déffence was in many ways a squabble between poets over their art, it also contained a program for the promotion of French in science and art.