Travis Smith: my resume, bio and photos back to the main blog page

“The best thing for being sad, is to learn something.”

WHO? T.H. White in The Once and Future King. Spoken by Merlin to Wart.

AND? The rest of the quote:

“That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, then you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

posted at 8:18 pm
on Sep. 5, 2005

Permalink



 
 

 

 

Who has mentioned this item?

Previous entry:
Overheard

Next entry:
Overheard

Comments

 

 

There are no comments for this entry ... yet. So leave one already! Go on!

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.

Syndication Links


Click here for the main
XML feed for this blog.



Column only



Side links only



Quotes only

 

MetaBlogs

AboutBlogs

Clients

Humor

Journalism

Los Angeles

Mac

News

Personal 1

Personal 2

Photos

Politics

Other A-F

Other G-Q

Other R-Z

SocialNetworking

Tech 1

Tech 2

Travel

Vancouver 1

Vancouver 2

Vancouver 3

Vancouver 4

BizBlogs

Back to Main

 

Powered by
Expression Engine

 

Copyright 1995 - 2024 Mar 29

 

 

You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)