Below is David Rieff's Christmas greeting. I thought it was too good to keep it for myself. So this - vicariously - will have to do as my seasonal greetings. happy Christmas and new year to all, Eyal

Every Christmas between 1929 and 1933, the English connoisseur Geoffrey Madan sent out to his friends a booklet called LIVRE SANS NOM containing 52 entries from his notebooks. Most were aphorisms by others though a few were his own. I thought I might revive Madan's custom and this year's product of that idea is what is attached.
Happy Christmas to all,
David

1. La melancolie, dernier espoir des malheureux.
---Mme de Stael

2. Il y a des appartements ou les meubles poussent mal.
---Ionesco

3. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
---Marcus Aurelius

4. All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
---Bagehot

5. There is contaminated goodness, and there is uncontaminated goodness.
---Suzuki Shoshan

6. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality.
---John Kenneth Galbraith

7. Whenever circumstance brings some welcome thing your way, stop in suspicion and alarm.
---Seneca

8. En general, les gens intelligents ne sont pas courageux et les gens courageux ne sont pas intelligents.
---de Gaulle

9. You cannot shit higher than your arse.
---Wittgenstein

10. Utopias are ultimately irreconcilable with human freedom.
---John Carey

11. I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
---Newton

12. One's first step in wisdom is to question everything --- and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
---Lichtenberg

13. Numbers constitute the only universal language.
---Nathanael West

14. The only things that are definable are those that have no history.
---Nietzsche

15. The good thing about Sartre and Camus is that they apparently suffer no longer from nostalgia for the good old days, even though they may know that in an abstract sense those days were better than ours.
---Hannah Arendt

16. Il ne faut pas uniquement integrer, il faut aussi desintegrer. Cest ca la vie. C'est ca la philosophie. C'est ca la science. C'est ca le progress, la civilisation.
---Ionesco

17. [Economics] is one of those pretty, polite techniques which tries to deal with the present by abstracting from the fact that we know very little about the future."
---Keynes

18. My own Marxism was like capitalism in Russia: it wilted before it had blossomed.
---Jon Elster

19. The past is not a menu.

20. Notre desarroi etait a la mesure de nos illusions.
---Jean-Herve Bradol

21. The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
---Adorno

22. Beware of your mind, and take responsibility for yourself.
---Suzuki Shoshan

23. Goethe's works were fragments of a great confession.
---Rahel Varnhagen

24. En dehors de la faculte de sympathie (qui est toute mon intelligence), il me semble que je n'existe pas et que ma personnalite morale se reduit a des possibilities diverses.
---Gide

25. Bend and you will be whole.
---Tao Teh Ching

26. J'ai perdu bien d'autres plaisirs, depuis que je ne sais plus voir les choses comme elles sont.
---Jean Paulhan

27. Toutes les fois que je ne songe pas a la mort, j'ai l'impression de tricher, de tromper quelqu'un en moi.
---Cioran

28. We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.
---Leopardi

29. Our politics was a rather less daring form of culture.
---Petr Pithart, reminiscing
about the Prague Spring

30. It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
---Adorno

31. It would be hypocritical to maintain that the writings of Howard Garfinkel are a model of lucidity.
---Ernest Gellner

32. In important ways, we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime.
---Bernard Williams

33. I've spent most of my life keeping my friends apart.
---John Dos Passos

34. The love of life is essentially as incommunicable as grief.
---F. Scott Fizgerald

35. Vouloir etre de son temps, c'est deja etre depasse.
---Ionesco

36. Let's have some new clichés.
---Samuel Goldwyn

37. "As God once said, and I think rightly…"
---attributed to Mrs. Thatcher

38. The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
---Aneurin Bevan on Churchill

39. If I had told you I wouldn't bring you here, you wouldn't have come.
---Stanley Baldwin paraphrased
by David Low

40. Man is almost always as wicked as he has to be.
---Leopardi

41. No matter what the outcome will be, this war is great and wonderful.
---Max Weber at the outbreak of
World War I

42. Are you sure we are going to be able to hold Moscow? I am asking with an aching heart?
---Stalin in a telephone
conversation with Marshal
Zhukov (February, 1941)

43. All soldiers run away, madam.
---The Duke of Wellington

44. What a real piece of luck this war has been as regards Ireland --- just averted Civil War and when it is over we may all be tired of fighting.
---General Sir William Birdwood
(August, 1914)

45. Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental; it treats all things as straw-dogs.
---Tao Teh Ching

46. Joy's recollection is no longer joy, while sorrow's memory is sorrow still.
---Byron

47. We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
---Wilde

48. Masters of the arts cannot be called adepts as long as they have not left behind attachment to their various skills.
---Yagyu (Zen swordsman)

49. Beaucoup d'ecrivains auraient avantage a couper le commencement et la fin de leurs recits: ce sont les parties qu'ils ratent le plus souvent.
---Chekhov

50. I never write until I can, so to speak, take dictation from myself.
---Hannah Arendt

51. Si j'avais pu mesurer vraiment l'etendue de mon ignorance, il n'y eut pas eu de livre, c'est certain; mais aux innocents les mains pleines.
---Denis de Rougemont

52. Efforce-toi de ne pas etre de ton temps.
--- Lichtenberg