Thursday, June 28, 2007

خوبصورت جنتوں میں سانپ چھوڑے رات بھر







The Greatest Letters Ever Written

The greatest letters ever written
Albert Einstein to his childhood friend Paul Habicht, written in Connecticut, 5 July, 1935. The reference in the first sentence is to Habicht's ill-health.
"I heard recently that the Devil - the only one who is never without work these days - has had his claws firmly in you. He will let you go again sooner or later, as in the long period of our separation has already happened to me twice, although he seemed to have me firmly in his paws. Do you still remember when we were young, and we were working together on those nice little electrostatic machines? Do you also remember our conversation about the politics of Germany, which you were still defending during the war, while I had already got to know at first hand the consequent dangers? I weighed anchor just at the right moment from there, so that I at least didn't get to feel the claws of the clean-cut heroes in my back. I have now set up home in this curious new world and am still brooding like an old hen on the same old scientific eggs, even if the bodily warmth which one needs for brooding has rather diminished over the years. What is so nice in this country is that the people don't sit so much on top of one another and, as a result, feel more comfortable with each other. So I sit here the whole summer in a quiet bay and sail in a little sailing boat as much as I want to. And one becomes some sort of Indian in this sun."
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Oscar Wilde's thankyou letter to Emily Wren, whose son Chrissie had sent a seasonal gift, dated 13 December 1888.
"I cannot tell you how charmed I am with Chrissie's present. It is a very sweet picture of him, and I prize it very much in memory of my little friend. I have considered it my duty to write him a letter expressing my gratitude... Give my regards to your husband."
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Charlotte Brontë on critical reaction to her recently published novel Shirley. Letter to her literary adviser, William Smith Williams, dated 9 November, 1849.
"I perused all the newspapers attentively. The Spectator and Athenaeum amused me. The critics of these papers are, I doubt not, acute men in their way - theirs is not the shallow weakness of The Observer and the Daily News. But when called on to criticise works of imagination, they stand in the position of deaf men required to listen to music, or blind men to judge a painting. The Practical their minds can grasp; of the Ideal, they know nothing."
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Manuscript of essay by Sir Isaac Newton about classical views "on the structure of the universe". It is believed to be his first written reference to gravity. Undated
"Fire is worshipped amongst the Medes and Assyrians... Anaximander teaches that the universe is infinite... Anaxagoras considered that the heavenly fires by the violence of their revolving broke off stones from the Earth and accumulated them and converted them into stars. Lucius, who contended that the Moon was an Earth suspended in the heavens, disputed against Parnaces, who wished the Moon to be a mixture of air and fire, lest it fall onto Earth... Now its motion and impetus help the Moon not to fall, for its natural motion of attraction (ie gravity) works upon every single thing, if it is not redirected elsewhere... Therefore gravity does not move the Moon since its motion is not brought down from its circular orbit."
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Winston Churchill, aged 16, writes home to his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, from Harrow, in November 1890, requesting a visit from his nanny, Elizabeth Ann Everest.
"Darling Mummy, I am getting on all right and am learning lots each day. One line to tell you I am well, happy tho' very tired... Please send Everest down, because she can help me in some work. I now send you my youthful love and remain your loving son..."
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John Donne's letter to Lady Kingsmill, after the death of her husband, 1624.
"We should not co-mplain, or reproach God, lest it render us uncapable of being reunited to those we loved here... We would wonder, to see a man, who in a wood, were left to hys liberty to fell what trees he would, take onely the crooked, and leave the straytest trees; but that Man had perchance a ship to build... and hath use of that kinde of timber