Vanity – Vocation
VANITY
Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by a nobleman but by an oaf that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people who are only cheapened thereby, have been aimed at inferiors. And Swann, who behaved simply and casually with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would instantly begin to pose, when in the presence of a housemaid. [Marcel Proust]
What is an obstacle in our loving men is the love they have for themselves, which is touchy, exclusive, inordinate, tragic. We could never love them as much as that. [Paul Géraldy]
Neither blame or praise yourself. [Plutarch]
Don’t be humble… you’re not that great. [Golda Meir]
Often, when I have had a picture well framed or have hung it in the right surroundings I have caught myself feeling as proud as if I had painted it myself. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]
One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance – that he had seen his Clarissa lying on the King’s brother’s table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought the flattery might be full heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, Sir, you were saying something about – ,’ pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman, provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisite sly air of indifference answered, ‘A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating.’ The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much. [James Boswell]
If we never flattered ourselves we should get very little pleasure indeed. [La Rochefoucauld]
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. [Oscar Wilde]
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. [William Hazlitt]
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. [Max Beerbohm]
One must always distinguish between vanity and conceit. The first seeks approbation and to some extent honours those on whose account it gives itself the trouble. The second believes itself already in full possession of approbation, and because it never strives to gain any, it wins none. [Kant]
He who is enamoured of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals. [Georg Lichtenberg]
VICE
As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue. [Albert Einstein]
Prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue. [Francis Bacon]
All sins are attempts to fill voids. [Simone Weil]
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. [Henry Miller]
One of my chief objections to the management of the universe is that we suffer so much more from our gentler and more amiable vices than from our darkest crimes. [A.E. Housman]
Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good? [Georg Lichtenberg]
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues. [Elizabeth Taylor]
I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my mind the world would consider me a monster of depravity. [W. Somerset Maugham]
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power. [La Rochefoucauld]
Few men are sufficiently discerning to appreciate all the evil they do. [La Rochfoucauld]
The surest protection against temptation is cowardice. [Mark Twain]
If he really does think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our house, let us count our spoons. [Samuel Johnson]
When the passions become masters, they are vices. [Blaise Pascal]
We are punished by our sins, not for them. [Elbert Hubbard]
So much are the modes of excellence settled by time and place, that men may be heard boasting in one street of that which they would anxiously conceal in another. [Samuel Johnson]
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity, Sin increases the experience of the race. [Oscar Wilde]
If virtue had everything her own way she would be as insufferable as dominant factions generally are. It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds. [Samuel Butler]
No banishment, indeed, to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged sojourn in the seclusion of an inner vice. [Marcel Proust]
Advice to wrongdoers: never stop halfway, but immerse yourself in it completely; make a habit of this changed course, see things in quite a different light, especially your own past.
What is the difference between a crime that is actually accomplished and one that is brooded over, savoured, gloried in but not committed? This: the first is a fact and cannot be undone, while the second leaves us with the illusion that our character is unaffected. We ought to feel the same prick of conscience in both cases, the same remorse, but we do not, because in the second case nothing hinders us from reverting to what we were before. However, Christianity expresses its view of the matter in no uncertain terms: ‘he who looks upon a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery…’
In short: a good conscience is nothing else but the expression of a desire we all have – to be ourselves and feel comfortable. Those who tell petty, occasional lies suffer far more than great criminals, simply because the latter are thoroughly used to it.
When we feel remorse for an evil action, it is not the harm done to others that troubles us but the disquiet it brings on ourselves (cf. Raskolnikoff).
The art of living, granted that living means making others suffer (as we do in our sexual life, commerce and every other activity), lies in developing an aptitude for playing all sorts of dirty tricks without letting them disturb our own peace of mind. A natural capacity for guile is the best endowment any man can have. [Cesare Pavese]
In every country the universal vices and evils of mankind and of human society are considered to be peculiar to that one place. I have never been anywhere where I have not heard people say: ‘Here the women are vain and inconstant, they do not care for reading and are ill-educated; here the people are inquisitive about other men’s business, they are gossipy and malicious; here money, favouritism, and baseness are all-powerful; here envy reigns, and friendship is insincere,’ and so forth; as if things were different anywhere else. It is through necessity that men are wretched, but they are determined to believe that they are so by accident. [Giacomo Leopardi]
How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit. [V.S. Pritchett]
Even in the circles of Hell there is the heroism of sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate. [George Eliot]
Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others. [Alphonse Karr]
He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave. [George Berkeley]
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. [Thomas De Quincey]
Confidence in others’ honesty is no light testimony of one’s own integrity. [Montaigne]
There is no man so good who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life. [Montaigne]
God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won’t. [Alfred Korzybski]
When you are as old as I, young man, you will know there is only one thing in the world worth living for, and that is sin! [Lady Jane Wilde]
In nature there are neither rewards or punishments – there are consequences. [Robert G. Ingersoll]
It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerance. [E.M. Cioran]
VIRTUOSO
The virtuoso is not a mason who, with chisel in hand, faithfully and conscientiously cuts his stone after the design of the architect. He is not a passive tool that reproduces feeling and thought without adding himself. He is called upon to let these speak, weep, sing – to render these to his own consciousness. He creates in this way like the composer himself, for he must embrace in himself those passions which he, in their complete brilliancy, has to bring to light. He breathes life into the lethargic body, infuses it with fire, and enlivens it with the pulse of gracefulness and charm. He changes the clay form into a living being. [Franz Liszt]
Technique is to be able to lay open the basic sense of a great work of, to make it clear. [Eugene Istomin]
It is much easier to play a thing quickly than to play it slowly. [Mozart]
We do not play music as we write it. [Francois Couperin]
The art of interpretation is not to play what is written. [Pablo Casals]
The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen: M. Ysaye may play the violin with M. Colonne on his shoulders; or M. Pugno may conclude his piece by lifting the piano with his teeth. [Claude Debussy]
It takes perhaps a thousand poor musicians to produce one virtuoso. [Ralph Vaughan Williams]
‘The sole purpose of virtuosity,’ he [Liszt] wrote in an essay on the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia in 1859, ‘is to enable the artist to reproduce everything that is expressed in the music. For this purpose it is indispensable, and one cannot cultivate it too assiduously.’ And in an article on Clara Schumann in 1855: ‘Virtuosity is not an excrescence but an integral part of music… it is not just a passive servant of the work in question, for either it will breathe life into the work entrusted to it or the work will die.’ Nor does he shrink from the corollary that the virtuoso has also the right – who can take his gifts from him? – to lavish his art on a mere trinket and bequeath to it ‘his poetic touch.’ [Ronald Taylor]
Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait to the living model. It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion. [Ferruccio Busoni]
You start from false premises in thinking it is my intention to ‘modernise’ the works. On the contrary, by cleaning them of the dust of tradition, I try to restore them their youth, to present them as they sounded to people at the moment when they first sprang from the head and pen of the composer. The Pathetique was an almost revolutionary sonata in its day, and ought to sound revolutionary. One could never put enough passion into the Appassionata, which was the culmination og the passionate expression of its epoch. When I play Beethoven, I try to approach the liberté, nervosité and humanité which are the signature of his compositions, in contrast to those of his predecessors. {Busoni, to a critic of his playing]
Walking with a friend one day Kreisler passed a large fish-shop where on the front slab, arranged in a row, lay a fine catch of codfish, with their mouths wide open and glassy eyes staring. Kreisler suddenly stopped, looked at them, and clutching his friend violently by the arm exclaimed: ‘Heavens, they remind me – I should have been playing at a concert!’ [?]
It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process. [Aldous Huxley]
… there is no work, however fine, that is not susceptible of a wide variety of interpretations, all equally plausible. The richness of a work of art consists in the number of meanings or values it can assume, while still remaining itself.
Thus a virtuoso is one who, by definition, gives life and real presence to what was merely a piece of writing at the mercy of all and sundry, and of their ignorance, awkwardness, or inadequate comprehension. The virtuoso makes the work flesh… [Paul Valéry]
Something like a nervous dread often takes possession of me while I am on stage in the presence of a large audience… One can hardly imagine how painful this sensation can be… This sense of uncertainty has often inflicted upon me tortures only to be compared with those of the Inquisition, while the public listening to me imagines that I am perfectly calm. [Anton Rubinstein]
VOCATION
It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying ‘really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style. [Quentin Crisp]
If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. [G.K. Chesterton]
… the secret of a good life: find out what you are interested in, however strange, or trivial, or ambitious, or shocking, or uplifting, and deal with that, for that is al you can deal with well. [W.H. Auden]
One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead. [Oscar Wilde]
The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed. [Niklaus Wirth]
The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. [Horace Walpole]
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves. [L.P. Smith]
The point is not to take the world’s opinion as a guiding star but to go one’s way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause. [Gustav Mahler]
Let each man exercise the art he knows. [Aristophanes]
Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do. [Lin Yutang]
There is only one success, to be able to spend your life in your own way. [Christopher Morley]
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about. [Albert Einstein]
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it. [B.F. Skinner]
I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough. [Richard Feynman]
An unfulfilled vocation drains the colour from a man’s entire existence. [Honoré de Balzac]
People don’t choose their careers; they are engulfed by them. [John Dos Passos]
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for artists. [L.P. Smith]
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. [Bertrand Russell]
Every man loves what he is good at. [Thomas Shadwell]
In any course of action it is not a good sign if a man starts with a determination to succeed in it, for that implies rivalry, pride, ambition. He should begin by loving the technique of any activity for its own sake, as one lives for the sake of living. That alone shows a true vocation and promises genuine success. All the social passions imaginable can follow later to amplify that single-minded love of technique – in that way they are bound to come – but to begin with them is a sing of indolence. In brief, one must devote oneself to an activity as if there were nothing else in the world. The moment of significance is when one begins, and the things of the world (social passions) do not exist in respect of that activity. Any one of us is capable of devoting himself to a work when he knows what he will get out of it, it is difficult to devote oneself gratuitously. [Cesare Pavese]
