Skip to main content

Inspirational quotes

Image result for dr seuss

I see the following, from Dr. Seuss, cited as an "inspirational quote" now and then. I find it odd:

"You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes, You can steer yourself any direction you choose."

I have to say, I don't feel inspired by it. And I'm not sure who is supposed to derive what from this.

I applaud, as always, TG's facility with the anapestic meter. Da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM. He makes it look so easy. It can actually be a tricky meter to handle for any length, which is why efforts to sound Seussian so often fail, as parodists slip into iambic.

Still ...

If I were an amputee, with no feet (and, accordingly no shoes) would it be inapplicable?

More important: anyone's decision about "where to go" in any context is constrained in a thousand ways. As refugee crises in the world ought to remind us: the powerful direct the traffic flows in the way that it suits them, not in the way that it suits the rest of us.


Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryNovember 14, 2019 at 7:12 PM

    Christopher, if one reads Dr. Seuss's statement literally, then you are right regarding both the amputee and the existence of external limitations on the directions in which one can steer oneself. But inspirational statements are not meant to be read literally, but as inspiring. If people feel ("feel," not "think") that there are no external limitations on the directions in which they can steer themselves (even if they are amputees), then they are more likely to steer themselves in directions that they otherwise would have considered impossible and therefore would not have tried.

    This is not to say that this particular inspirational statement is likely to inspire many people. I, for one, would give it the label you did: pseudo-profound.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. HenryNovember 15, 2019 at 9:10 AM

      Seuss's statement seems close to Sartre's "Existence precedes essence," which also strikes me as pseudo-profound. But maybe I should withhold judgment on that until I read "Being and Nothingness."

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more