Futility Closet

“In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.” — André Maurois

“If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.” — Socrates

“I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat.” — George Bernard Shaw

“We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.” — John Steinbeck

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” — Will Rogers

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?” — T.S. Eliot

“We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.” — Nietzsche

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” — Shakespeare

“Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.” — Defoe

“We think as we do mainly because other people think so.” — Samuel Butler

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” — Oscar Wilde

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous half-possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.” — Emerson

“History may be read as the story of the magnificent action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.” — Robert Lynd

“Perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age.” — Albert Einstein

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” — H.G. Wells

“The mind is at its best when at play.” — J.L. Synge

In this spirit, Synge invented Vish (for “vicious circle”), a game designed to illustrate the hopeless circularity of dictionary definitions.

Each player is given a copy of the same dictionary. When the referee announces a word, each player writes it down and looks up its meaning. Then she chooses one word from the definition, writes that down and looks up its meaning. A player wins when the same word appears twice on her list.

The point is that any such list must eventually yield circularity — if it’s continued long enough, the number of words in the list will eventually exceed the total number of words in the dictionary, and a repetition must occur.

“Vish is no game for children,” Synge writes. “It destroys that basic confidence in the reasonableness of everything which gives to society whatever stability it possesses. To anyone who has played Vish, the dictionary is never the same again.”

“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” — Samuel Johnson

“If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.” — Thomas Fuller

“Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.” — Baltasar Gracián

“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” — Daniel Dennett