A Word a Day

Plato, Apology 38a, translated by Benjamin Jowett

Socrates wrote nothing; he is known mainly through his students' accounts, Plato's among them. Convicted of impiety and corruption, with Anytus proposing death, he had to name a penalty of his own. Someone may ask, he says, why he cannot hold his tongue and live quietly in a foreign city. That, he answers, would disobey the god; and daily talk about virtue, examining himself and others, is the greatest good of man.

The famous line is his reason for refusing that way out. The Greek ends 'for a human being', which Jowett leaves out. Examining what one believes, with others, is what makes a human life worth living. Socrates says the jury will believe this even less, yet he will not trade it for safety.

Plato, Republic, Book II, 377a

Plato gives these words to Socrates, talking with Adeimantus in the Republic, a dialogue of around 375 BC on justice and the just city. Their subject is the education of the city's heroes, and Socrates has just said that music, with the stories told to children, comes before gymnastics. Jowett, like the Greek, has 'any work', and the sentence goes on: 'especially in the case of a young and tender thing', since that is when character is formed.

The claim is general, but Socrates applies it at once to children, who take whatever stamp is pressed on them. He concludes that the writers of fiction must be censored, and that mothers and nurses should tell only the authorised stories. For him, the first impressions shape all that follows.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, ch. 7, 1098a

The printed line is a free English version. Aristotle's Greek says one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day; 'summer' follows English translations such as Ross's and Thomson's, and 'fine' is a translators' addition, found in Chase and Thomson. The sentence goes on: so one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy. Just before it, Aristotle adds that happiness must come 'in a complete life'.

For Aristotle happiness is an activity, measured over a whole lifetime; one good day no more makes a happy life than one swallow makes a spring. The swallow saying is a proverb: the Byzantine Suda records it as one, adding that one good day cannot perfect the wise, nor one bad day cast them into ignorance.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7, ch. 67

The printed line is a paraphrase. Meditations 7.67 says only that very little is necessary for living a happy life; the second clause is not in the passage. Marcus wrote the Meditations in Greek for his own guidance. Here he reminds himself that, though he has despaired of becoming a dialectician or a natural philosopher, he need not give up being free, modest, social and obedient to God.

The added thought is still his, voiced elsewhere: nowhere does a man retire with more quiet than into his own soul, and the soul is dyed by its thoughts. In 7.67 the point is personal: a happy life rests on very few things, and those stay within reach even after hopes of excelling in learning fade.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10, ch. 16, translated by Staniforth

The Meditations record the private notes Marcus wrote to himself as emperor, with his reflections on Stoic philosophy. The Greek says he should no longer discuss at all what kind of man the good man is, but be such a man. 'Waste no more time arguing' and the clipped 'Be one' are Staniforth's English of 1964, here with 'about' added; George Long has 'No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.'

The note just before reminds him that little of his life remains and that he should live as on a mountain. Beside it, the line reads as impatience with talk: discussing virtue is not yet virtue; what counts is to become the good man.

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius 13.4, translated by Richard Mott Gummere

Seneca wrote these letters at the end of his life, in retirement after more than ten years of work for Nero; Letter 13 falls in AD 62 or 63, depending on the chronology. Its subject, in Gummere's title, is groundless fears. The sentence opens: there are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than to crush us. Seneca adds that he speaks not in the Stoic strain but in his milder style.

'Imagination' is Gummere's word; Seneca's Latin is opinione, opinion or belief. Much of what weighs on people is what they believe about harm, not the harm itself. Hence his advice: not to be unhappy before the crisis comes, since the feared dangers may never arrive.

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 1.3, translated by John W. Basore

The words come early in On the Shortness of Life, written in or about AD 49 for Paulinus, then in charge of Rome's grain supply and, Basore suggests, a near relative of Seneca's wife. Seneca is answering the complaint that life runs out too soon, one even the greatest of physicians made: 'life is short, art is long'. In the line, Basore's 'a short space of time' becomes 'a short time to live'.

Seneca's answer reverses the complaint. Life is long enough for the greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. As the first chapter concludes, 'the life we receive is not short, but we make it so'. The fault lies in how time is spent, not in how much is given.

Epictetus, Enchiridion 5, as recorded by Arrian; translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The Enchiridion is a short manual of precepts compiled around AD 125 by Epictetus's pupil Arrian, who would have heard him teach around AD 108. Arrian said he wrote down what he heard in Epictetus's own words, as nearly as he could. The line trims Higginson's 'the views which they take of things'. Chapter 5 gives an example at once: death is nothing terrible, or it would have seemed so to Socrates; the terror lies in the judgement about it.

The word rendered 'views' is dogmata, judgements or beliefs about things. What upsets people is not what happens but their judgement of it. So, the handbook says, the hindered, disturbed or grieved should blame their own views, not others: the uninstructed reproach others, the beginner himself, the fully instructed neither.

Epictetus, Discourses 3.23.1, as recorded by Arrian; translated by Elizabeth Carter

The Discourses are Arrian's record of Epictetus's lectures, generally dated around AD 108, set down as nearly as he could in Epictetus's own words. Carter heads this chapter 'Concerning such as read and dispute, ostentatiously'. The English wording is hers, first published in 1758, and Higginson's 1890 translation keeps it almost unchanged. The Greek is plainer: first say to yourself who you want to be, then do accordingly what you do.

Athletes, Epictetus notes, first determine what they wish to be. The would-be lecturer should likewise ask what his talk is for, and whether he would be useful or be praised. A philosopher's school, he says later, is a surgery, to be left in pain, not pleasure. What one does takes its shape from who one means to be.

Heraclitus, fragment B12 (Diels-Kranz); the 'twice' form: Plato, Cratylus 402a

The familiar line is a paraphrase. Heraclitus of Ephesus was active around 500 BC. His river fragment B12, preserved by Eusebius and taken by Kirk and Marcovich as the only genuine one, says that other and other waters flow on those who step into the same rivers. The 'twice' form comes from Plutarch and from Plato's Cratylus, where Socrates reports Heraclitus as saying that all things move and nothing stays.

In B12 the rivers stay the same while their waters are always other; the Stanford Encyclopedia calls it, among other things, a statement of the coincidence of opposites. The lesson is less that nothing lasts than that a thing can keep its identity through change: the river remains the same river, its water never the same.

Heraclitus, fragment B6 (Diels-Kranz), in Aristotle, Meteorology 355a; translated by Kathleen Freeman

Heraclitus, a philosopher of Ephesus active around 500 BC, is heard here through Aristotle's Meteorology. Aristotle argues that, as fire is not fed by the water it heats, the sun cannot feed on the moisture it draws up. If it did, he says, there would be a new sun not only every day, as Heraclitus says, but every moment. Diels prints only 'new each day' as Heraclitus's own words, fragment B6.

The saying belongs to Greek thinking about the heavens. Heraclitus, Diogenes Laertius reports, held that the heavenly bodies are bowls in which bright exhalations burn as flames, the sun's the brightest. The 'new sun every moment' is Aristotle's objection, not Heraclitus's claim. Beside his river fragment, the saying describes something that seems constant yet is new each day.

Cicero, Letters to Friends 9.4, to Varro

The printed line is a paraphrase, shaped by popular use. Cicero wrote si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil: if you have a garden in your library, nothing will be lacking; Shuckburgh has 'everything will be complete'. It closes a joking note from Tusculum that opens by playing on the logic of the 'possible' and the 'necessary' over whether Varro will come.

What Cicero meant is not settled. In April, amid miserable times, Cicero had told Varro their studies seemed to yield a richer harvest than of old; the June note is lighter. Shuckburgh, who finds the phrasing strange, suggests a garden to sit and converse in, like philosophers in the Academy: on that reading, with books and a place to talk, the visit will lack nothing.

Cicero, Pro Plancio (For Plancius), section 80

Cicero spoke in the Roman Forum in September 54 BC, defending Gnaeus Plancius on a charge of electoral malpractice. As quaestor in Macedonia, Plancius had taken the exiled Cicero into his residence at Thessalonica. Accused of exaggerating that kindness, Cicero replied that his gratitude was his own to judge. Here he wants nothing more than to be, and be seen to be, grateful, for this one virtue is the greatest and the mother of all the rest.

Cicero's word is mater, 'mother'; 'parent' is from English versions such as Yonge's. He goes on to call filial piety gratitude toward parents. The praise is courtroom argument, made while his gratitude was under attack; yet gratitude, felt and shown, stands at the source of what is owed to parents and country.

Confucius, Analects 2.17

The Analects collects sayings attributed to Confucius (c. 551-479 BC); tradition holds that his followers compiled it, and large parts date from the Warring States period. Here the Master speaks to Zilu, one of his best-known disciples, whom the book portrays as brave and rash, ready for action but impatient of learning. He calls him by his personal name, You (由), and offers to teach him what knowing is.

Knowing, in his answer, is honesty about where knowledge ends: to hold as known what one knows, and to allow that one does not know what one does not. The Chinese ends plainly, 'this is knowing'. Said to a disciple quick to act, it checks the urge to claim to know more than one does. Both admissions belong to knowing.

Confucius, Analects 2.15, translated by James Legge

Confucius lived from about 551 to 479 BC, and some scholars question whether every saying in the Analects is his. This one, recorded under 'The Master said', pairs two failures: learning without thinking ends in confusion, thinking without learning in danger. 'Labour lost' is James Legge's rendering of 罔; others have 'a waste'.

Neither half suffices alone, and thought is not set above study. In another saying (15.30) Confucius recalls a whole day without eating and a whole night without sleeping, spent thinking, to no use; it is better, he concludes, to learn. The moral is balance: learning needs thought to become understanding, and thought needs learning to stay safe.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 76

The Tao Te Ching is traditionally ascribed to Lao Tzu, whose historical existence is debated. Chapter 76 is absent from the oldest manuscript, the Guodian slips, and may postdate them; the earliest near-complete copies come from a tomb of 168 BC. The chapter observes that people are soft and weak at birth, hard and stiff at death, and plants tender in growth, withered when dead.

It then turns the image on power: the army that relies on its strength does not conquer, and the strong tree invites the feller; the firm and strong take the lower place, the soft and weak the higher. Elsewhere the text says everyone knows the soft overcomes the hard, yet no one can practise it. The moral is a warning against trusting force and rigidity.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 33, after Gia-fu Feng and Jane English

The Tao Te Ching is traditionally ascribed to Lao Tzu, whose historical existence is debated; its oldest excavated fragments, the Guodian slips, date to around 300 BC. Chapter 33 opens with paired lines: who knows others is wise (智), who knows himself is clear-sighted (明). The commentary printed with the Wang Bi text adds that knowing others is mere cleverness, while knowing oneself rises above it. Then come two more: who conquers others has force, who conquers himself is strong.

'Enlightenment' here renders 明, clear sight, not a Buddhist term; Legge has 'intelligent'. The inward ranks above the outward: knowing oneself above knowing others, as the chapter sets overcoming oneself above overcoming others. It goes on to call the man content with his lot rich.

Zhuangzi, chapter 2, 'On the Equality of Things', after Herbert Giles

The story closes the second chapter, 'On the Equality of Things', one of the seven inner chapters long held to be wholly Zhuang Zhou's; he flourished in the later 4th century BC. The Chinese is in the third person: on waking, Zhou did not know whether Zhou had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly was dreaming it was Zhou. The 'I' and 'a man' are from Giles's 1889 translation.

The passage never says which dreamt which. It closes instead: between Zhou and the butterfly there must be a distinction, and this is called the transformation of things. The story plays with transformation and treats the line between waking and dreaming as another false division. Its lesson is that the self, too, is caught up in that change.

Buddha, Dhammapada, verse 1, translated by F. Max Müller

Tradition holds that the Buddha, a wandering teacher of the 6th or 5th century BC, spoke the Dhammapada's verses on various occasions. In the Pali the first opens 'Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā': mind precedes thoughts, is their chief, and makes them. Müller's sentence goes on as the verse does: if a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the ox.

Read whole, the verse is an ethical statement: the quality of the mind behind an act brings returns to match. In the traditional explanation 'mind' means intention, and intentional deeds make up kamma, which follows a person and bears results. The moral lies in that second half: a corrupted mind brings suffering after it.

Buddha, Dhammapada, verse 5 (chapter 1, 'The Pairs')

The stories that set the verses in context, this feud among them, come from a commentary of the 4th or 5th century AD, which has the Buddha speak verse 5 at Savatthi. Verse 5 follows one on grudges: in those who do not harbour 'he abused me, he beat me', hatred will cease. The printed line is a free version: the Pali says hatreds cease by non-hatred (averena), and 'love' is Max Müller's word. 'Eternal' is true to the Pali, where Müller has 'an old rule'.

The commentary reads the verse as an exhortation not to return hatred for hatred but to conquer it by loving-kindness, explained as the absence of hatred. Answering in kind prolongs the feud; the way out is to stop harbouring the grievance.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 64, after James Legge

Chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, ascribed to Lao Tzu, though its authorship and date are debated, urges action before a thing appears. A tree one can barely embrace grows from a tiny shoot; a nine-storey terrace rises from a heap of earth; a journey of a thousand li starts beneath one's feet. 'A single step' is James Legge's, and 'miles' stands in for li; the silk manuscripts have a height of a hundred ren instead.

In context the line counsels dealing with things while small and easily held. Right after, the chapter warns that he who acts with an ulterior purpose does harm, and he who takes hold of a thing loses his hold. Great things start where one stands, and are best tended early, without grasping.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 8

Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, a text traditionally ascribed to Lao Tzu, whose historical existence is debated, opens with this image. 'Nourishes' renders 利, 'benefits'; Legge has 'benefiting all things'. Water does good to all things without contending, settles where people dislike to be, and so is near the Way. The commentary printed with the Wang Bi text glosses that place as lowliness.

Not contending is joined here to humility: water takes the lowest place, and that is what brings it near the Way. Legge's chapter adds that when one with the highest excellence does not wrangle about his low position, no one finds fault with him. The highest good, on this reading, does good to all and asks for no higher place in return.

Rumi, Divan-e Shams, quatrain 157; version by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

The English is from The Essential Rumi of 1995, made with John Moyne; Barks rewrote Rumi from other translators' English. The quatrain belongs to the Divan named for Rumi's master Shams, mostly written from about 1247 on. It says: beyond unbelief and Islam there is a plain; in its midst we have a longing; the knowing mystic who reaches it lays down his head, for there is no unbelief, no Islam, and no 'there'.

Barks turns unbelief and Islam into wrongdoing and rightdoing and adds the meeting; the quatrain has a shared longing and a place where even 'there' falls away. Rumi turned mystic after meeting the dervish Shams in 1244, and the image is a mystic's: the seeker passes beyond belief and unbelief alike and bows his head.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 'On Work'

The Prophet, published in 1923, is a book of 26 prose-poetry fables that the Lebanese-American Gibran wrote in English. Its prophet, Almustafa, has lived twelve years in Orphalese when he sees the ship that will carry him home. Asked by a ploughman to speak of Work, he rejects the saying that work is a curse: in working, one fulfils a part of earth's furthest dream.

The sermon reaches the line and goes on at once: whoever can work only with distaste had better leave the work and take alms at the temple gate from those who work with joy, since bread baked with indifference feeds but half man's hunger. The moral is not toil for its own sake but care: work shows love only when love goes into it.

Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam (1926)

The printed line is a free version: it keeps only the first sentence of an aphorism that goes on, 'We fell them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness.' Sand and Foam, subtitled 'A Book of Aphorisms', came out from Knopf in October 1926; most of Gibran's early writing had been in Arabic, but this, like most of his work after 1918, was in English.

That second sentence is the aphorism's point: it turns the praise of trees into a rebuke. The earth writes poems on the sky, and people cut them down to set their emptiness on paper. The next aphorism turns to writing itself: whoever cares to write, 'and only the saints know why you should', needs knowledge and art and magic.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 'On Beauty'

Gibran wrote The Prophet in English; Knopf published it in September 1923. Its prophet, Almustafa, has waited twelve years in Orphalese for the ship that will bear him home, and most of the book is his speeches to the crowd. Here a poet asks him to speak of beauty. What the people called beauty, he answers, were only needs unsatisfied; beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

The printed line stops before his next sentence, which turns the image on the listeners themselves. A parallel line does the same: beauty is life when life unveils her holy face, but you are life and you are the veil. Beauty, for Almustafa, is not found elsewhere; those who seek it are both the eternity and the mirror.

Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 82

Stray Birds, a book of short aphorisms in Tagore's own English, was published by Macmillan in New York in 1916 and dedicated to T. Hara of Yokohama; from May that year he was lecturing in Japan and the United States. The collection opens on the same two seasons: stray birds of summer come to the window to sing and fly away, and yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.

Two aphorisms later he writes that in death the many becomes one, in life the one becomes many. Here the wish is that each season keep its own beauty: life like summer flowers, death like leaves that fall without song. Death keeps a grace of its own.

Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (1928)

Fireflies, published by Macmillan in 1928, gathers short jottings. Tagore's preface says they began in China and Japan, where people asked him to write thoughts in his own hand on fans and pieces of silk. The earlier form stands in Lekhan, a bilingual book of jottings whose English note is dated 7 November 1926: 'The butterfly does not count years but moments and therefore has enough time.'

In Fireflies the span shrinks from years to months: a creature that lives by moments, not by their sum, has time enough. Two jottings earlier, Tagore hopes his slight words may lightly dance upon time's waves when his works heavy with import have gone down. Both lines prize the slight and brief over the long and weighty.

Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (1928)

Fireflies, published by Macmillan in 1928, collects short jottings that Tagore says began in China and Japan, where people asked him to write his thoughts in his own hand on fans and pieces of silk. The line about trees is followed at once by another: 'The burden of self is lightened when I laugh at myself.' In his earlier Lekhan, beside that jotting, the image reads differently: 'Mother with her ancient trees points to the sky in endless wonder.'

Across the three images the trees reach upward: on tiptoe with longing, pointing in wonder, and here speaking. The effort never ends, and heaven is cast as a listener: the trees are the earth's speech, still under way.

Matsuo Bashō, Kawazu Awase (The Frog Contest), round 1, left

It appeared in Kawazu Awase in the intercalary third month of 1686. Whether Bashō made it at the contest, held at his hut in Fukagawa, or the poem prompted the contest is unclear. The old pond was probably the one beside the hut. Bashō first offered only the frog and the sound of water; his pupil Kikaku proposed kerria blossoms for the opening, and Bashō chose 'an old pond' instead.

Classical poetry had rarely mentioned frogs, and then for their croaking; here the frog is heard only in the sound of the water as it jumps in. Some Zen influence can be seen, but the deeper readings and legends grew from its fame. Shikō, a disciple, hailed it as the poem in which Bashō's style opened its eyes.

Matsuo Bashō, Oku no Hosomichi, opening paragraph, translated by Sam Hamill

The printed line is a free version, cut from its subject. In the opening paragraph of Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), those for whom every day is a journey are boatmen who spend their lives on boats and packhorse drivers who grow old leading horses; the journey is their dwelling. The account of Bashō's journey of 1689 was reworked until 1694 and printed in 1702.

The passage goes on: many of the ancients, poets he revered such as Li Bai, Du Fu, Saigyō and Sōgi, died on the road, and he too has long been stirred by the wind-blown cloud to wander. The working traveller's daily road becomes Bashō's model: a life with no home but the journey.

Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, 'Genjōkōan', translated by Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi

The Genjōkōan is a letter, written so that a layperson could follow it; its colophon dates it to mid-autumn of 1233. He set it first among the Shōbōgenzō's 75 fascicles, as a preface for beginners. The line stands in a chain: to study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self.

The chain goes on: to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things, which frees the body and mind of oneself and of others. 'Study' here is nearer to practice, done over and over until it saturates body and mind. Forgetting the self is not neglecting it: in this practice the self is found at one with others and the world.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Prologue

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, published in 1970, was edited from transcripts of Suzuki's talks by Trudy Dixon and Richard Baker, who went over the edits with him. The Prologue comes from a talk at Los Altos on 11 November 1965, which has 'In beginner's mind we have many possibilities, but in expert mind there is not much possibility.' There he explains shoshin, beginner's mind, and says that to keep it always is the goal of practice.

Later in the Prologue the sentence returns as 'in the expert's mind there are few', joined to a mind that is empty, ready and open to everything; to discriminate too much, he warns, is to limit oneself. It is no contempt for expertise: even Zen books are to be read with a fresh mind.

Izumi Shikibu, Gyokuyōshū 1476, English version by Jane Hirshfield

Izumi Shikibu, born perhaps in 976, was a mid-Heian court poet, a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu; the waka survives in the Gyokuyōshū, an imperial anthology presented in 1312. She was talking with one man when another arrived; a commentator takes them for lovers who met by chance. The waka's moon is still in the sky at dawn: 'at midnight' is Hirshfield's wording, and her earlier version with Mariko Aratani reads 'at dawn'.

The poem turns on puns: 'mid-sky' also means neither one thing nor the other, and 'no shadow left' is both the moon's clear light and knowing completely. Left alone and in between, she sees the dawn moon and fully knows her own sorry state. Hirshfield's midnight casts the solitude as contemplation; the waka is wry.

Ono no Komachi, Kokinshū, Spring II, 113, translated by Donald Keene

Ono no Komachi, whose dates are unknown, was a ninth-century waka poet, one of the Six Poetic Immortals; in Japan her name is still a synonym for feminine beauty. The poem stands in the Kokinshū's second book of spring, headed 'topic unknown', and is no. 9 of the Hyakunin Isshu. Donald Keene's English is close, but gives nagame only as 'long rains'; the word also means brooding.

Each key word carries two senses. Furu is both passing time in the world and rain falling; nagame is both brooding and the long rains; the world also implies love affairs. While she brooded through the rains, the blossoms faded and so did her looks. The poem mourns time spent in idle thought and in love, while beauty passed.

Einstein, interviewed by Viereck, The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929, p. 117

George Sylvester Viereck, an American poet and journalist, printed the conversation in The Saturday Evening Post; the words are his record of it. Einstein says he believes in intuitions and inspirations: when two expeditions went forth to test relativity, he was convinced their conclusions would tally with his hypothesis. Asked the question, he answers that he is enough of the artist to draw freely upon his imagination.

He goes on: 'Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.' This is no dismissal of learning; it describes how intuition ran ahead of proof in his own physics. The version in Cosmic Religion, published in 1931, adds that imagination is a real factor in scientific research. Knowledge stops at what has been found; imagination reaches past it, and the tests come after.