How To Live Off Your Student Loan

There are only two ways to handle money...

The careful:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

And the reckless:

I don’t want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

How To Attract Your First Love

Women - know your power:

And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Men - be mysterious:

Her partiality for the prince created an unease in her that she could not control.  The most obscure discourse of an attractive man is more disturbing than an open declaration of love from one who is not.

Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Cleves

True love is the realization that:

There was no one in the world nearer and dearer or more important to him than that little woman with the stupid lorgnette in her hand, who was in no way remarkable.

Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog

Which means you should tell your partner:

No woman can
Truthfully aver
That any man
Ever loved her
As I love you.

No lover bound
By pledge of heart
Was ever found
True on his part
As I was true.

Catullus, Carmen 87

But refrain from the passionate excesses below, which may result in suicide.  It is possible to love too much!

I often think that if only I could hold her to my heart for once, just once, that void would be entirely filled!

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

How to Eat and Drink

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

Get up, lad, it is dawn,
Fill the crystal goblet with the ruby wine;
In the hole and corner of transience you will seek this borrowed moment
Long and never find it.

Omar Khayyam, The Ruba’iyat

How to Survive a Hangover

Promise to reform:

He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Or take drastic measures:

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

What To Say in Your First Seminar/Tutorial

The adult equivalent of the apple on the desk:

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Honore de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin

The confirmation of all the taxpayers’ worst fears:

Enough of thought, philosopher!
Too long hast thou been dreaming
Unenlightened, in this chamber drear,
While summer’s sun is beaming!

Emily Bronte, The Philosopher

The sign of a true learner:

We are far indeed from knowing all we want.

La Rochefoucauld, Maxims


How to Make Friends and Influence People

Taking lessons from the masters, remember these three key things …

Consider yourself a prince amongst men:

The prince must consider, as has been in part said before, how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible; and as often as he shall have succeeded he will have fulfilled his part, and he need not fear any danger in other reproaches.
… It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock; and he should endeavour to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity, and fortitude.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

If someone has already stolen the prince’s role, become their favourite:

We always like those who admire us, but not always those we admire.

 La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Remember there are many ways to help those around you:

The wise lady … will help them with her own resources very willingly and liberally as a matter of course, according to her ability.  As largesse does not consist only in material gists, as a wise man has said, but also in comforting words, she will comfort them with hopes for a better future.

Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies

How to Get On

Take risks:

But the real travellers are only those
Who leave for leaving’s sake; hearts light as air,
They never do their destiny oppose;
Not knowing why, they always say: I dare!

Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage

It is important to remember the following advice next time you argue who should make the tea:

In summer, when the heat brings on a thirst, a lion and a wild boar went to drink at a little spring.  They argued about who should drink first, and the quarrel escalated into a  life-and-death struggle.
But, stopping for a moment to catch their breath in the midst of their combat, they noticed some vultures waiting nearby to devour whichever one fell first.  So, putting aside their hostility, they said, “It would be better to become friends than serve as food for vultures and ravens.”

Aesop’s Fables

The moral of the story is:
Share the making of the tea, or you may find yourself left with the washing up.

See every set back as a challenge, not a defeat:

No occurrences are so unfortunate that the shrewd cannot turn them to some advantage, nor so fortunate that the imprudent cannot turn them to their own disadvantage.

La Rochefoucauld, Maxims


How to Play the Field

Remain humble

A river, seeing an oxhide floating in her waters, asked it its name.
‘I am called Hard,’ it replied.
Then, increasing the effect of her current upon it, the river replied:
’Find another name, for I shall quickly make you soft.’
Often, bold and arrogant people are overwhelmed by the misfortunes of life.

Aesop’s Fables

The moral for our current time is this: do not think a t-shirt proclaiming “Sex instructor: first lesson free” will improve your chances.

If you hark back to a time when women went to university to procure a well-off husband, but do not want to give up the beer and kebabs, remember the following:

I seem’d like an old Piece of Place that had been hoarded up some Years, and comes out tarnish’d and discolour’d; … nor indeed, was I any better; tho’ I was not at-all impair’d in Beauty, except that I was a little fatter. … However, I preserved the Youth of my temper; was always bright, pleasant in Company, and agreeable to every-body … and tho’ I was not so popular as before, and indeed, did not seek it, yet I was far from being without Company.

Daniel Defoe, Roxana

How to Enjoy Studying

For the serious among you:

The gentleman seeks neither a full belly nor a comfortable home.  He is quick in action but cautious in speech. He goes to men possessed of the Way to be put right. Such a man can be described as eager to learn.

Confucius, The Analects

For those who wish to be reminded of their own intelligence:

Those, boy, who went before
Have been laid in the dust of self-delusion;
Go, drink wine and hear the truth from me,
It was all hot air that they spoke.

Omar Khay’yam, The Ruba’iyat

For those with essay crises:

Paint me an eternal tea-pot for I usually drink tea from eight o’clock at night to four o’clock in the morning.

Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

How to Reinvent Yourself

A radical suggestion:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

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