A little philosophy of life — Themes and Context

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Authors: Burdette, Robert J. (Robert Jones), 1844-1914 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2024 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Christian life; Conduct of life; Maxims, American Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 7,021

Reading time 31 min

Text sections 5

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Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Christian life,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #74047

A 1914 collection of aphorisms and reflections by Robert J. Burdette, blending Christian moralizing with wry observations on luck, memory, and human folly, framed by a grandfather's farewell to life.

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File: pg74047

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A LITTLE PHILOSOPHY _of_ LIFE

[_By_ ROBERT J. BURDETTE]

“_For what is your Life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away._” --JAMES 4; 14.

COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE

TO MY LITTLE GRANDDAUGHTER CLARA BRADLEY WHEELER

_Who, with tottering baby steps, is coming in to the entrance of the Stage of Life, just as her Grandfather, with footsteps equally uncertain, is slowly passing out at its Exit. The baby, doubtless wondering much that the World should be so immeasurably large. He certainly, marvelling, as he looks back, that a Stage so small and circumscribed could hold so many people. She looks at her Grandfather with the Wonder-Wisdom in the baby eyes, but she does not know what he is thinking, nor how much he knows. And he, looking at the Little One with the meditative inquiry of Old Age, knows just as little what she is thinking, just as little how much she knows. For a handful of days only have they known one another, each speaking a language strange and incomprehensible to the other. But the two hearts, one old as the ashes of last year’s camp fires, the other young and fragrant as the roses of this June morning, have knitted themselves together with a love that will outlive Time. This is one of the Beautiful Mysteries of Life. “And the Evening and the Morning are another Day.”_

“SUNNYCREST” PASADENA, CALIFORNIA CHRISTMASTIDE, 1913

A LITTLE PHILOSOPHY _of_ LIFE

Is there such a thing as a “philosophy of life?” Life is the philosophy of everything; the study of all things; the testing of all things.

The lucky man is he who despises luck. The unlucky one is the fellow who worships it.

Great inventions may be wrought out in the brain. Great thoughts are born in the heart.

One of the best ways to find trouble, my boy, is to carry a revolver without knowing how to use it.

Memory may be a hell or a paradise. It depends on whether you spend your youth manufacturing brimstone or planting roses.

When I hear a man trying to do all the talking for the crowd, I remember that a drum makes more noise than a cask of sugar, because it is empty.

A man is a fool to worry about his “past,” if he has one. A man or woman with a “past” isn’t half so badly off as the sinner who yet has “something coming to him.”

I don’t believe in rejecting and despising a man because of his faults. Make them useful to him. For example, a conceited man is like a tire, which is of no earthly account until it is inflated.

One of the meanest things about sowing wild oats is that the profligate scatters about half the seed on some good man’s wheat field. And more than half the wild oats turn out to be rye.

Whenever you begin to complain that you are not appreciated, you are plainly off your job. When a dog is chasing a rabbit he doesn’t care whether you call him pet names or throw stones at him.

Very few men are vain, I think. But all men love comfort as their chief joy. There isn’t one man in a thousand who would exchange his good digestion for a handsome face. Now, a woman----

Money talks--yes, my son. But only while it’s working. When it goes on strike, or is loafing on general principles, it loses interest in everything and becomes as silent as a log on a mudbank.

A man can hardly be so bad that he will not have some friends who believe in him and who stick to him. But the trouble with a bad man is, that his friends are so much like himself he would be much better off without any.

It is pleasant to have people love you who do not know you. But oh, the immeasurable love of a friend who has found you out, who knows you through and through, and still loves you. Well, that’s the way God loves us.

It has been a good world to me. I have always had more friends than I could count and more good fortune than I could measure. I have always got everything I wanted. When I couldn’t get it, I didn’t want it, which is the same thing as having it. Sometimes it is better.

No, religion does not give--it does not promise a man immunity from misfortunes. Neither does an accident policy promise or protect the holder from a railway smash-up or an automobile accident. But it is a beautifully comforting thing to the insured while he’s in the hospital.

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Robert J. Burdette's A Little Philosophy of Life (1914) opens with a dedication that sets its tone: the author, nearing death, addresses his infant granddaughter, Clara Bradley Wheeler, as both enter and exit life's stage. The book's 7,000 words consist of aphorisms, homely metaphors, and personal reflections, many drawn from Burdette's experience as a humorist and Baptist minister. Cataloged under Christian life and conduct of life, the text indeed offers moral counsel, but its voice is more colloquial than pious—a drum that makes noise because it is empty, a conceited man likened to an inflated tire. The excerpts reveal a work that is part sermon, part farewell, and part wry commentary on human nature.

Aphorisms as Autobiography

The catalog subjects—Christian life, conduct of life, maxims—suggest a tidy manual, but the excerpts show Burdette using aphorisms to sketch his own biography. He writes of a man who “despises luck” and of memory as a hell or paradise depending on one's youth. These are not abstract; they are the observations of someone looking back. The dedication's contrast between the baby's “Wonder-Wisdom” and the grandfather's “meditative inquiry” recurs throughout. When Burdette says, “When you begin to complain that you are not appreciated, you are plainly off your job,” the maxim carries the weight of a career's disappointments. The aphorisms are less universal truths than personal artifacts, shaped by a specific life at its close.

The Metaphor of the Mill

Burdette's closing image—the old mill grinding its last grist as the stream fades—is the book's most sustained metaphor. He writes, “there is yet a little grist in the hopper, and while the water serves I will keep on grinding.” This is not a generic reflection on mortality but a precise, homely figure drawn from rural life, consistent with the author's Midwestern roots. The mill appears only at the end, yet it retroactively organizes the preceding fragments: each aphorism is a handful of grain, the book itself the mill's final product. The metaphor also echoes the dedication's “handful of days,” grounding the abstract philosophy in tangible, daily labor.

Geography of Faith

Near the end, Burdette shifts from aphorism to a sustained meditation on sunset viewed from his seaside home, “Eventide.” He names specific places—Yokohama, Tokyo, Manila, Port Arthur—that he has visited, then asserts that beyond the sunset lies a land he knows “with a sublime assurance.” This passage is remarkable for its concreteness: faith is mapped onto actual geography. The catalog subject “Christian life” is here rendered as a traveler's certainty, not doctrinal argument. Burdette does not claim proof; he claims sight: “I know it is there, not because I have seen it, but because I do see it.” The distinction is subtle but crucial, and it grounds the book's spiritual claims in personal, sensory experience.

Readers should approach A Little Philosophy of Life not as a systematic treatise but as a collection of occasional pieces, unified by the author's voice and his awareness of ending. The catalog subjects—maxims, Christian life—are accurate but incomplete; the book's humor and particularity resist easy categorization. Pay attention to the metaphors (tires, drums, mills) and the way Burdette turns commonplaces into personal testimony. The work rewards those who read it as a document of a specific life, not a manual for all lives.

Sitting with Burdette’s gentle aphorisms, I recalled how he treats luck as a quiet visitor, not a master. That same wry patience seems to linger in Pistols for two — Themes and Context, though its world is sharper. Both share a knowing shrug at human folly, a remembrance that we are, after all, only passing through.