Please Help with Quotation Search
Prisoner at War
Hi, All:
I'm looking for the original Latin of a quote by Augustine or Aquinas,
I think, that goes something to the effect of "the wound up where he
started" or "he arrived at his point of departure" (much more
elegantly put, of course).
I was able to locate it fairly easily on google like two years ago but
can't anymore.
TIA!!
Alastor
next best thing - W.H.Auden? It's from his poem 'The Maze':
Anthropos apteros walked for days,
Walked whistling round and round the maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.
The hundredth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed
And recognized that he was lost.
"Where am I? Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.
If theologians are correct,
A Plan implies an Architect;
A God-built maze would be, I'm sure,
The universe in miniature.
Are data from the world of sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What, in the universe I know,
Can give directions how to go?...
All statements about what I feel,
Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
My knowledge ends where it began:
A hedge is taller than a man."
Anthropos apteros, perplexed
To know which turning to take next,
Looked up and wished he were a bird
To whom such doubts must seem absurd.
I skipped about 8 verses. It captures something of the spirit of your
voyage in search of something, whatever it is you are searching for. I
think you'll find it right under your very nose, when the time is
right, God willing. Good luck. Maybe someone else can help.
Ed Cryer
"Alastor" <ros...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:d7d6cad2-308a-4204...@c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
I think that's far preferable to some Catholic theologian's words.
However, if we need an ancient language, here's an ode from Horace.
XXXIV
Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens,
insanientis dum sapientiae
consultus erro, nunc retrorsum
uela dare atque iterare cursus
cogor relictos: namque Diespiter
igni corusco nubila diuidens
plerumque, per purum tonantis
egit equos uolucremque currum,
quo bruta tellus et uaga flumina,
quo Styx et inuisi horrida Taenari
sedes Atlanteusque finis
concutitur. Valet ima summis
mutare et insignem attenuat deus,
obscura promens; hinc apicem rapax
Fortuna cum stridore acuto
sustulit, hic posuisse gaudet.
My prayers were scant, my offerings few,
While witless wisdom fool'd my mind;
But now I trim my sails anew,
And trace the course I left behind.
For lo! the sire of heaven on high,
By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven,
Today through an unclouded sky
His thundering steeds and car has driven.
E'en now dull earth and wandering floods,
And Atlas' limitary range,
And Styx, and Taenarus' dark abodes
Are reeling. He can lowliest change
And loftiest; bring the mighty down
And lift the weak; with whirring flight
Comes Fortune, plucks the monarch's crown,
And decks therewith some meaner wight.
Alastor
me or not. I have formed a mental image of you as a 'lapsed'
Christian, somebody who wants to be pious but who is put off by much
that's hypocritical and flawed in the way religion is publicly
presented, and maybe too by some fundamental philosophical or
doctrinal issues. Anyhow, this poem is about a lapsed believer who has
seen the light again. That puzzles me.
Alastor
reawakenings could be described as ending where he began; yes that's
well spotted by you. All the same, how is it that that particular ode
has been in your mind waiting for an opportunity to emerge? I'm being
impertinent of course but an interest in literature is always an
interest in humanity and I can't help but be curious. Or maybe you
know Horace inside out, cover to cover, and can find any quote to suit
the occasion.
Ed Cryer
I've read Augustine's Confessions from cover to cover. That man speaks
from the heart across the centuries and hits home. Not with his
Christianity; more with his neo-Platonism.
I'll recommend two passages. One about stealing apples from an orchard
when he was a kid; and his later meditations on guilt.
A second about being on his way to give a lesson in rhetoric to the
emperor of the West himself (in Milan, I think) and meeting some drunks
in the street.
That Horace ode I know well and like. It's in metre, dressed in
rhetoric, but something about it speaks to the heart. And to me it says
something similar to what Dickens was saying in "Great Expectations".
You climb the ladders of life; you adopt airs and graces; you find
yourself on a particular path and then find out it's not your own but
something fashioned by other people.
So you sometimes have to backtrack to find where you stopped carving out
your own destiny and got on a gravy-train ride.
Ed
B. T. Raven
>
> "Alastor" <ros...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:b4fdcef1-1c2d-44b7...@s12g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
>> Yes, the quote could well be relevant to Augustine, whose lapses and
>> reawakenings could be described as ending where he began; yes that's
>> well spotted by you. All the same, how is it that that particular ode
>> has been in your mind waiting for an opportunity to emerge? I'm being
>> impertinent of course but an interest in literature is always an
>> interest in humanity and I can't help but be curious. Or maybe you
>> know Horace inside out, cover to cover, and can find any quote to suit
>> the occasion.
>
> I've read Augustine's Confessions from cover to cover. That man speaks
> from the heart across the centuries and hits home. Not with his
> Christianity; more with his neo-Platonism.
>
> I'll recommend two passages. One about stealing apples from an orchard
> when he was a kid; and his later meditations on guilt.
Weren't they pears instead of apples?
;-)
Eduardus
Ed Cryer
"B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote in message
news:bMqdnVd6p5m2Mnra...@sysmatrix.net...
Right. Pardon me. Mea culpa.
This is the Latin;
arbor erat pirus in vicinia nostrae vineae pomis onusta
This got me thinking that an "apple tree" would be a wrong place to sin
under (in or on) because of Adam and Eve in Eden. So I looked up the
Genesis lines and couldn't see any specific fruit at all there;
de fructu vero ligni quod est in medio paradisi
The "tree" is a "lignum" with "fructus".
Ed
John Briggs
Apple is "malum" which is clearly 'evil'...
--
John Briggs
Rich Alderson
[in re: the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis]
> Apple is "malum" which is clearly 'evil'...
You really ought to include a smiley when you're joking.
(You are making a joke, right?)
--
Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
ne...@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless
ozandy
news:d23ec83c-8624-41c2...@q78g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
Don't mind these guys, they can get a bit self-absorbed sometimes. Ed's
quote from Horace about "tracing the course I left behind" is hardly what
you are looking for. I'd like to help, but we need more details. Can you
remember what you used for your google search the last time? Can you
remember any details or context of the quote? What did you do with it last
time you found it? Write it down, use it in an e-mail....
Andy
Alastor
> "Prisoner at War" <prisoner_at_...@yahoo.com> ha scritto nel messaggionews:d23ec83c-8624-41c2...@q78g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
In Ed's defence and my own, it should be noted that the original
message was posted in the forum 'humanities.classics' and that is
where we answered it. Anything that gets posted there deserves the
literary treatment it gets.
Ed Cryer
"ozandy" <nos...@myprovider.com> wrote in message
news:DtYFj.1988$VK4.407@trnddc08...
This one comes up often on a Google search for Augustine quotes.
"Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest
be filled with that whereof thou art empty".
Ed
ozandy
>original message was posted in the forum 'humanities.classics' and
>that is where we answered it. Anything that gets posted there
>deserves the literary treatment it gets.
My dear chap, I don't mind the literary treatment, I quite enjoy it. It just
seemed that you guys were concentrating so much on the literary treatment
that you failed to answer his question.
Andy
William C Waterhouse
It is at least reminiscent of the striking (but non-Latin) last
two lines of John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning":
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
and makes me end where I begun.
William C. Waterhouse
Penn State
Alastor
My dear Andy, I did answer his question. It was a 'round' answer.
Sometimes those are the profoundest answers. Since you enjoy the
literary treatment, here's Pope's description of a lawn bowl, which is
also a good description of a round answer:
Which, as more ponderous, made its aim more true,
Obliquely waddling to the mark in view. (Dunciad I,171-2)
I waddled obliquely
Alastor
introduces a very 'round' question - how many scholars does it take to
change a light bulb?
Decimus Canus
Could you perhaps be thinking of Boethius? Consolation of Philosophy,
Prose XII:
"qua egrediaris introeas, nunc uero quo introieris egrediare"
"thou dost now go in where thou meanest to go out again, and after go
out, where thou camest in."
This has also been translated as:
"You seem to begin where you ended and to end where you began."
--
Decimus...
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Don't mind these guys, they can get a bit self-absorbed sometimes. Ed's
> quote from Horace about "tracing the course I left behind" is hardly what
> you are looking for. I'd like to help, but we need more details. Can you
> remember what you used for your google search the last time? Can you
> remember any details or context of the quote? What did you do with it last
> time you found it? Write it down, use it in an e-mail....
>
> Andy
Hehe, I find their forgetfully-engrossed-professor "routine" quite
charming, actually. ;-)
Let's see...I do seem to recall that this phrase had a "hoc" in there,
and a "ubis" or "ubi"...that's all I remember.
Damn google!!! I hate how they keep shifting things around. I
understand the reasoning, but it seems that more often than not they
serve up crap and obscure the real stuff.
Prisoner at War
Either one -- to tell the departmental secretary to schedule a work
order -- or none: once they make tenure, those light bulbs over their
heads never need changing again!
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Could you perhaps be thinking of Boethius? Consolation of Philosophy,
> Prose XII:
>
> "qua egrediaris introeas, nunc uero quo introieris egrediare"
>
> "thou dost now go in where thou meanest to go out again, and after go
> out, where thou camest in."
>
> This has also been translated as:
>
> "You seem to begin where you ended and to end where you began."
>
> --
> Decimus...
Thanks so much, but no! It's either Aquinas or Augustine, and it
definitely was "he" and not "you" -- and indicative mood, not
subjunctive (hope I got my terminology right!)....
Blast, I'll get it in a fortune cookie and not even recognize it;
that's my luck! =(
Rodericius
wrote:
Could it be Aquinas quoting Augustine: "In se autem reversus est cum
ab eis quae forinsecus frustra illiciunt et seducunt, in conscientiae
suae interiora suam intentionem reduxit" ['But he entered again into
himself when he redirected his intention away from external things,
which entice and seduce in vain, and towards the innermost recesses of
his conscience']?
Rod.
ozandy
>
>
> Hehe, I find their forgetfully-engrossed-professor "routine" quite
> charming, actually. ;-)
>
> Let's see...I do seem to recall that this phrase had a "hoc" in there,
> and a "ubis" or "ubi"...that's all I remember.
>
> Damn google!!! I hate how they keep shifting things around. I
> understand the reasoning, but it seems that more often than not they
> serve up crap and obscure the real stuff.
Using the clues you gave, I found this:
nam illuc uenit ubi erat [, quia in sua propria uenit, et in hoc mundo erat,
et mundus per eum factus est ]
Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus 62
but this is talking about the arrival of the Holy Spirit, which arrived
where it had always been, which doesn't seem the same thing.
EdC
Ed
"Prisoner at War" <prisone...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3b5d3bdf-edd4-4696...@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
Alastor
>
> - Show quoted text -
I think Winston Churchill should have the final word in this thread:
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But
it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
(Lord Mayor's Luncheon, Mansion House, London, 10 Nov. 1942)
The final word?
Or is this just the final initial word?
Prisoner at War
HEY!!!
That could be it...it looks rather familiar...I do recall an "illuc"
in there...hmm....
No sure about the Holy Spirit context...what I loved about the quote
was how it seemed to express (or could be construed as expressing [in
its abbreviated form, anyway, without the theological context]) the
idea of spinning one's wheels in the mud....
Hmmm..."nam illuc uenit ubi erat"...it looks familiar, but I don't
recall the "nam" and I seem to recall it being a slightly longer
sentence somehow....
Pretty close, though; thanks! I may use it....
Prisoner at War
>
>
> I think Winston Churchill should have the final word in this thread:
>
> "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But
> it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
> (Lord Mayor's Luncheon, Mansion House, London, 10 Nov. 1942)
>
> The final word?
> Or is this just the final initial word?
LOL
Well, Ozandy seemed to have found it...wish I could recall exactly,
but his phrase seems closest to what I (seem to) remember....
BTW, Winnie was such an orator; why can't all the English majors
writing speeches today come up with something even worthy of Pericles'
fireplace....
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Could it be Aquinas quoting Augustine: "In se autem reversus est cum
> ab eis quae forinsecus frustra illiciunt et seducunt, in conscientiae
> suae interiora suam intentionem reduxit" ['But he entered again into
> himself when he redirected his intention away from external things,
> which entice and seduce in vain, and towards the innermost recesses of
> his conscience']?
>
> Rod.
Ach, no, nothing so "involved" -- but it's an interesting quote you
brought up; thanks!