Saturday, March 10, 2007

Thought for the day...

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects."

- Herman Melville

Who knew that the dude who wrote about catching a big ol' white whale was so smart?

7 comments:

begins with v said...

I like Melville in shorter excerts such as this...keeps my attention longer than Moby Dick ever did...

great quote!

Shawn said...

Yeah...I start Moby Dick starts loosing it for me somewhere just after - "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."

something said...

As a sociopath - i couldn't disagree with Mellville more.

Anonymous said...

It is so true. Everything we do can impact on others and then again on ourselves in ways we can barely imagine.

S.M. Elliott said...

A thousand fibers connect us all? I'm a frayed knot. ;)

Melville was pretty brilliant in his shorter forms, like "The Tartarus of Maids".

thephoenixnyc said...

There is an intersting phenomonon that I have been studying for a few years.

19th century American writers and poets, who (like Whitman) never say or read a word of Eastern philosophy whop reproduced its most basic tenets in their writing.

Shawn said...

pnyc - That is so true. I think I've noticed it before, but never really clearly. Thanks for shining a light on that.

Now...I'm off to ponder how these writers and poets got all Eastern in the middle of Victorian and Edwardian social settings.

That is a weird phenomenon