Starr Jordan Quotes

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it, and Virtue is doing it.

[David Starr Jordan] claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.

The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.

Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection, and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in, for teaching, for ichthyology, for contributions to higher ed. An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.

Today is your day and mine, the only day we have, the day in which we play our part. What our part may signify in the great whole we may not understand, but we are here to play it, and now is the time. This we know, it is a part of action, not of whining. It is a part of love, not cynicism. It is for us to express love in terms of human helpfulness. This we know, for we have learned from sad experience that any other course of life leads toward decay and waste.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

There is no real excellence in all this world that can be separated from the right living.

Long ago, in the infancy of civilization, man learned that there were drugs in Nature, cell products of the growth or transformation of "our brother organisms, the plants," by whose agency pain was turned to pleasure. By the aid of these outside influences he could clear "today of past regrets and future fears," and strike out from the sad "calendar unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday.

each subjective pleasure which had no foundation in action, there was a subjective sorrow,

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living. —DAVID STARR JORDAN

No hay en todo el mundo un triunfo verdadero que pueda separarse de la dignidad al vivir. DAVID STARR JORDAN

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.” DAVID STARR JORDAN

In Palo Alto, David Starr Jordan found parallels between Hutten’s struggles and his own fight for academic freedom. There was one phrase of Hutten’s that particularly resonated. Die Luft der Freiheit weht (The wind of freedom stirs). Since 1906, that obscure German phrase has encircled the Stanford Tree in the school emblem.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it,” observed David Starr Jordan.