मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, December 02, 2025

Battle of Austerlitz@220...Pinnacle of Napoleon's Success and Seeds of His Ultimate Destruction

The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805), also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important military engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle occurred near the town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire (now Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic). Around 158,000 troops were involved, of which around 24,000 were killed or wounded. The battle is often cited by military historians as one of Napoleon's tactical masterpieces….

Napoleon:

“There is a movement in engagements when the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives a victory; it is the one drop of water which makes the vessel run over.…”

Count Yorck von Wartenburg :

“Napoleon did not, after all, vanquish his enemies so much by the battles of Ulm and Jena, however disastrous these were, as by his incredible marches.”

Honoré de Balzac,  Louis Lambert, 1832:

“When I read the story of the Battle of Austerlitz I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears and made my inmost self quiver.”

 Alistair Horne, "How Far From Austerlitz?: Napoleon 1805-1815", 1996 :

"...If Austerlitz raised Napoleon to the pinnacle of his success, it also turned his head and filled it with the delusion that no force or combination of forces could now stop him conquering the world. On the Pratzen Heights were born the seeds of his ultimate destruction.

Summing up on the ‘dazzling glory’ of Austerlitz, (Adolphe) Thiers was to write a generation later:

A campaign of three months, instead of a war of several years, as it had first been feared, the Continent disarmed, the French Empire extended to limits which it ought never to have passed, a dazzling glory added to our arms, public and private credit miraculously restored, new prospects of peace and prosperity opened to the nation.… For calm and reflective minds, if any such were left in presence of these events, there was but one subject for fear – the inconstancy of Fortune, and what is still more to be dreaded, the weakness of the human mind, which sometimes bears adversity without quailing and rarely prosperity without committing great faults...."

 


 Claudia Cardinale in "Austerlitz", 1960

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