Laudator Temporis Acti

Goethe (1749-1832), "The Four Seasons," couplet 35 (tr. David Luke):

Beauty asked: 'Why must I perish, oh Zeus?'
'Why, I gave beauty', answered the god, 'only to perishable things.'

Warum bin ich vergänglich, o Zeus? so fragte die Schönheit.
    Macht' ich doch, sagte der Gott, nur das Vergängliche schön.

Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), Les Amours de Psyché, Book II (tr. Eliza Wright):

In play, love, music, books, I joy,
In town and country; and, indeed, there 's nought,
E'en to the luxury of sober thought, —
The sombre, melancholy mood, —
But brings to me the sovereign good.

J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique,
La ville et la campagne, enfin tout ; il n'est rien
Qui ne me soit souverain bien,
Jusqu'au sombre plaisir d'un coeur mélancolique.

Plato, Laws 6.763e-764a (tr. Trevor J. Saunders):

Voting is compulsory for all in every election, and anyone who fails in his duty and is denounced to the authorities should be fined fifty drachmas and get the reputation of being a scoundrel.

χειροτονείτω δὲ πᾶς πάντα· ὁ δὲ μὴ 'θέλων, ἐὰν εἰσαγγελθῇ πρὸς τοὺς ἄρχοντας, ζημιούσθω πεντήκοντα δραχμαῖς πρὸς τῷ κακὸς εἶναι δοκεῖν.

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), pp. 117-118:

When I made this discovery, I determined to learn Greek, or at any rate to read Greek by the light of every facility except literature — a little of it anyway  — a play, half a play, a speech, a couplet — something that was in itself the thing I sought, and not a rendering of it. I had recourse to the garret of memory and there I found a small seedbag of moldy Greek, and with this I began experiments. On reëxamining the first readers and easy grammars which my whole generation had been put through, it seemed to me that they were admirable primers. None need be better. Then why did I not know Greek? The reason was that I had never followed up the beginnings. I had never read a page of Greek out of natural curiosity, nor had I ever seen anyone else do such a thing as to read Greek for pleasure. If anyone will read ten pages of English in the manner in which the schoolboy is taught Greek, he will see why Greek is dropped by the boy as soon as possible. Let anyone analyze ten pages of English, answer grammatical questions upon it, let him be asked to parse and give the parts of irregular verbs, to distinguish between varieties of subjunctive, and he will begin to loathe English literature.

Euripides, Suppliant Women 612 (tr. David Kovacs):

Yet I see that the gods' ways are different from those of mortals.

διάφορα πολλὰ θεῶν βροτοῖσιν εἰσορῶ.

Cf. Isaiah 55:8 (KJV):

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.

Panchatantra, introduction, tr. Dermot Killingley, Beginning Sanskrit, Vol. I (Newcastle upon Tyne: Grevatt & Grevatt, n.d.), p. x:

Book-learning is endless, life is short, and obstacles are many. We should keep to what is essential, like swans extracting milk from water.

The same, tr. Arthur W. Ryder:

Since verbal science has no final end,
Since life is short, and obstacles impend,
Let central facts be picked and firmly fixed,
As swans extract the milk with water mixed.

The same, tr. Chandra Rajan:

Your Majesty, it is true that life is short, and it is beset by many obstacles. Knowledge knows no bounds, and it takes years to acquire it. Therefore, it is held that the essentials of knowledge have to be extracted and grasped, just as the noble bird, the swan, extracts the milk from the water it is mixed in.

C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves (February, 1932; on Froissart):

To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder—considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 12, § 155 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway):

In early youth we sit in front of our impending course of life like children at the theatre, in cheerful and tense expectation of the things to come. How fortunate that we do not know what is actually to come. For to anyone who knows, children at times would seem like innocent delinquents who are not condemned to death, to be sure, but to life, and have not yet heard the terms of their sentence. — Nevertheless everyone wishes himself an old age, thus a state of which it can be said: 'Today it is bad and it will get worse every day — until the worst arrives.'

In früher Jugend sitzen wir vor unserm bevorstehenden Lebenslauf, wie die Kinder vor dem Theatervorhang, in froher und gespannter Erwartung der Dinge, die da kommen sollen. Ein Glück, daß wir nicht wissen, was wirklich kommen wird. Denn wer es weiß, dem können zu Zeiten die Kinder vorkommen wie unschuldige Delinquenten, die zwar nicht zum Tode, hingegen zum Leben verurtheilt sind, jedoch den Inhalt ihres Urtheils noch nicht vernommen haben. — Nichtsdestoweniger wünscht Jeder sich ein hohes Alter, also einen Zustand, darin es heißt: „es ist heute schlecht und wird nun täglich schlechter werden, — bis das Schlimmste kommt.”

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), p. 118:

Caesar's Commentaries is the dullest book in Latin. It is like making a road to read it. It is not a book; it is a stone-crushing machine. The teacher, a two-dollar-a-day man, stands beside the machine and runs it. And this is the Classics.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to a more sympathetic perspective in Christopher B. Krebs, "A Style of Choice," chapter 8 of Luca Grillo and Christopher B. Krebs (edd.), The Cambridge Companion to the Writings of Julius Caesar (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017) pp. 110-129 (at 129, footnotes omitted):

Whatever its specific immediate effect, Caesar's neat, formulaic, and seductively simple Latinity surely contributed to his elevation to classic status (obtained in the Renaissance, not since relinquished). But, just as surely, it alone cannot account for the fascination engendered in intellectuals as diverse in interests, epochs, and cultures as Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Johann Gottfried Herder. At least as important was a simplicity of a different (and more troubling) kind, effected by his rhetoric of stringency: it transforms disorderly realities on far-flung western-European grounds and largest-scale sanguinary mayhem inflicted and suffered by the hundreds of thousands into seemingly rational and ineluctable moves in a game of wits on the board of Gallia omnis. In so removing the war from the contingencies of the “there and then,” it elevates it to a timeless tale of superior power, as told in the third person by an Olympian observer by the name of Caesar, whose formulaic narrative, in plot as well as language, generates a beguiling sense of familiarity. And, to turn to the final aspect of Caesar’s classic, the rational swiftness of the writing appears but a mirror of the forceful swiftness of the warring: Caesar’s narrative "march[es] along, orderly as a legion." [F. E. Adcock Caesar as Man of Letters 1956:71]. The same mind, it seems, imposes order on the fields of battle and the accounts of battle; its style is its image.

Related post: Incurably Tedious Authors.

Euripides, Suppliant Women 748-749 (tr. Edward P. Coleridge):

Ye cities likewise, though ye might by parley end your mischief,
yet ye choose the sword instead of reason to settle all disputes.

πόλεις τ᾿, ἔχουσαι διὰ λόγου κάμψαι κακά,
φόνῳ καθαιρεῖσθ᾿, οὐ λόγῳ, τὰ πράγματα.

Christopher Collard ad loc.:

Christopher Morley (1890-1957), Parnassus on Wheels (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, 1917), p. 7:

Hot bread and coffee, eggs and preserves for breakfast; soup and hot meat, vegetables, dumplings, gravy, brown bread and white, huckleberry pudding, chocolate cake and buttermilk for dinner; muffins, tea, sausage rolls, blackberries and cream, and doughnuts for supper—that's the kind of menu I had been preparing three times a day for years.