--- Wall Street proverb, via Jason Zweig, "Should You Be Buying What Robinhood Is Selling?," Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2021
Excerpt
One of Wall Street’s oldest and frankest sayings is “When the ducks quack, feed ‘em”—meaning that whenever investors are eager to buy something, brokers will sell it like mad.
--- Simone Weil, quoted by Toril Moi in "I came with a sword," an LRB review of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, by Robert Zaretsky
From Moi's piece:
Zaretsky rightly devotes a chapter to Weil’s ideas on attention. For her, attention is not focused, tense concentration. It has nothing to do with willpower. Attention is attente – a waiting, a letting go, an unselfish opening. To struggle with a problem in geometry is valuable whether or not we manage to solve it, because it teaches us to be open to God and therefore to others. The ‘love of God’, she writes
has attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour ... is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.
The point of studying is not to learn this or that, but to acquire this discipline of the soul. Weil argues that we can train our attention by doing geometry, Greek and Latin translation and by writing, if we are willing to wait for the right word to come. ‘The intelligence,’ Weil writes in a passage I particularly love, ‘can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.’ Weil’s method is hardly a way to get straight As, for if there is no joy, there should be no work. As always, she practised what she preached. She failed the entrance exams to the École Normale the first time she tried, because she disliked her history teacher and so never turned up for his classes.
I believe the quote is from "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." Here is a reprint (pdf); see there for source and translator.
--- Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Third (h/t Diane Sieber)
Excerpt
All tragedies are finish'd by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage;
The future states of both are left to faith,
For authors fear description might disparage
The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath,
And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage;
So leaving each their priest and prayer-book ready,
They say no more of Death or of the Lady.
--- Jorie Lagerwey, quoted in "Famous for good reason? Britain elevates do-gooders to celebrities," Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2021
In context
The rise of Dr. Bodalia and Dr. Okorocha, who have a combined following of more than 85,000 on Instagram alone, reveals a shift in who, and what, constitutes celebrity in the eyes of Britons during the pandemic. At a time when the U.K. records one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from COVID-19, the country has been granting iconic status to those who serve communities, do public good, and raise awareness for social causes.
“Celebrity is cyclical and responds to what the overarching culture wants at any given time,” says Jorie Lagerway [sic], associate professor in television studies at the University of Dublin. “The reason we have celebrities is to tell us what’s important in our culture at that particular moment in history.”