Biblia

Polonius - What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet - Words, words, words.

[William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene II]

[Africana] [Anthropology] [Asiana] [History] [Mathematics] [Music and Musicology] [Physics] [Political Science & Economics] [Sinica]

Africana

All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven's rich blessing come down on every one,
American, English or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.

Livingston's last words before his death (1 May 1873) at Chief Chitambo's village in Ilala.

[Horace Waller (ed.), The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death. Continued by a Narrative of His Last Moments and Sufferings, Obtained from His Faithful Servants Chuma and Susi, John Murray (2 vols), London, 1874]

Biography

A pretty extensive acquaintance with African Expeditions enables me to offer a hint which, if you take it in the same frank and friendly spirit in which it is offered, you will on some future day thank me and smile at the puerilities which now afflict you. With the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all manner of things in others. Now I earnestly and most respectfully recommend you try a little aperient medicine occasionally and you will find it much more soothing than writing official letters.

David Livingston's response (11 June 1858) to a letter of complaint of Royal Navy's Commander Norman Bedingfeld, captain of HMS Ma-Robert, the first vessel used for the Zambesi Expedition.

[John Peter Richard Wallis (ed.), The Zambesi Expedition of David Livingstone, 1858-1863, Chatto & Windus (2 vols), London, 1956]

History

Anthropology

Cross-disciplinary

Cultural

Genetic

Linguistic

Il futuro ha un cuore antico, e avviare un nuovo rapporto culturale col remoto passato salda una nuova unità spirituale fra noi e i popoli scomparsi che, come astri spenti, continuano a irradiare il lucente messaggio che giunge sino a noi. A essi mancò il dovuto riconoscimento di essere stati alle origini operanti sugli avvenimenti dei nostri destini.

Giovanni Semerano

[cited in: Umberto Galimberti, All'origine delle parole, la Repubblica, Jul 22nd, 2005]

Asiana

Travelling thus Eastwards, and arrested at each forward step by some relic of a dead civilzation, or of a glorious but forgotten past, the imagination of the European cannot but be impressed with the thought that he is mounting the stream of ages, and tracing towards its remote source the ancestry from which his race has sprung. His feet are treading in an inverse direction the long route of humanity. The train that hurries him onward into new scenes seems at the same time to carry him backward into antiquity, and with every league that he advances the mise en scene recedes into a dimmer distance. History lies outspread before him like the page of a Chinese manuscript, to decipher which he must begin at the bottom and work his way up to the top.

[George Nathaniel Curzon, Russia in Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Question, Longmans, London, 1889]

History

Si vous n'avez autre chose à nous dire, sinon qu'un barbare a succédé à un autre barbare
sur les bords de l'Oxus et de l'Iaxarte, en quoi êtes-vous utile au public?

[Francois-Marie Arouet dit Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique portatif, London, 1764]

Travel

History

It was in the reign of George III that the above-named personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.

[William Makepeace Thackeray, Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Written by Himself, 1856; previously published as: G.S. FitzBoodle, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, Esq., a Romance of the Last Century, Fraser's Magazine, 1844]

Contemporary

Maritime

Mathematics

History

I will omit all discussion of the science of the Indians, of their subtle discoveries in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians, and of their valuable methods of calculation which surpass description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value.

[Severus Sebokht (Nestorian bishop in Keneshra), Letter ??, AD 662]

Popular

Pure

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

[Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895]

Music & Musicology

Et Musique est une science
Qui veut qu'or rie et chante e danse.
Cure n'a de mélancolie
Ni d'homme qui mélancolie
A' chose qui ne peut valoir,
Ains met tel gens en non chaloir.
Partout où elle est, joie y porte,
Les déconfortés réconforte,
Et n'est seulement de l'ouir,
Fait-elle les gens réjouir.

[Guillaume de Machault, Ode à la Musique, c.1372]

Biography

Theory

Physics

History

Walter Brattain left Bell Labs to teach at the small college in Oregon where he had first been a student in 1920. He remained modest about his great achievement, though he did once suggest that rock-and-roll musicians used his transistor for more amplification than he'd intended. John Bardeen moved to the University of Illinois and earned a second Nobel Prize (for work on superconductivity), the only physicist ever to be so honored. He remained even more modest than Brattain: one long-term golfing patner at the university asked him, after years of playing together, just what was it he actually did for a living.

[Bodanis, 2004]

Popular

Political Science & Economics

Sinica

Gianfranco Prini (gianfranco.prini@unimi.it)