Scylla And Charybdis Quotes

ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.

that prudence of yours makes you veer about, determined not to commit yourself to either side, but to pass safely between Scylla and Charybdis; with the result that, finding yourself battered and buffeted by the waves in the midst of the sea, you assert everything you deny and deny everything you assert.

Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.

My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter—it’s hard work to be a woman.

Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.

Basically, if the author is totally un-educated, then the text won't bring out his best. Normal, educated people always understand that. But here's the thing—when the author is very highly-educated, the result is the same: the text turns out sub-par. Like if Charybdis was an uneducated cannibal, and Scylla was a sophisticated gourmand. Real literature snakes between the two. Like Hera's hair.

I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family. Veering toward scylla seemed much the safer route, and after navigating the passage, I soon washed up, a bit stunned, on a new shore. Like Odysseus on the island of the cyclops, I found myself facing a "being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant nothing." In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever.

There is great danger in this Golden Mean, one of whose main objects is to steer clear of shipwreck, Scylla being as fatal as Charybdis. No, this lofty and equable attitude is worse than wrong unless it derives from striking the balance between two very distant opposites. One of the worst perils of the present time is that, in the reaction against ignorant bigotry, people no longer dare to make up their minds about anything. The very practice, which the A∴A∴ so strongly and persistently advocates, tends to make people feel that any positive attitude or gesture is certainly wrong, whatever may be right. They forget that the opposite may, within the limit of the universe of discourse, amount to nothing. [....] Of course, in no case does the Golden Mean advise hesitating, trimming, hedging, compromising; the very object of ensuring an exact balance in your weapon is that its blow may be clean and certain.