Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens,
we have to keep going back and begin all over again.
-Andre Gide.
Men are given to worshipping manevolent gods, and that
which is not cruel seems to them not worth their adoration.
-Anatole France.
God was satisfied with his work, and that is fatal.
-Samuel Butler.
The trees reflected in the river -- they are the unconscious
of a spiritual world so near them. So are we.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks.
All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting
in a chair and looking into the distance.
-V.V.Rozanov, Solitaria, 1912.
Those who think they have no need of others become unreasonable.
-Vauvenargues, Reflections & Maxims, 1746.
One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light. -Chateaubriand.
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us,
cease to interest us. -F. H. Bradley, Aphorisms, 1930.
Why long for glory, when one despises it as soon as one has it? But that's precisely what the ambitious man wants: to have it in order to despise it.
-Jean Rostand, On Vanity, 1925.
Never argue with a man with nothing to lose.
-Gracian, 1647.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great
will-power. -Balzac, La Muse de Department, 1843.
To have a horror of the bourgeois .... is bourgeois.
-Jules Renard, Journal, 1889.
Riches, knowledge, & honor are but several sorts of power.
-Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.
Some people are molded by their aspirations, others by
their hostilities. -Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart.
To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy
the time to read them.
-Schoepenhauer, On Reading Books, 1851.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
-T. S. Eliot, 1920.
We are often dismayed to find that even disasters cannot
cure us of our faults.
-Vauvengargues, Reflections & Maxims, 1746.
One's real life is so often the life one does not lead.
-Oscar Wilde.
Everyone has his own theater, in which he is the manager,
actor, prompter, playwright, scene-shifter, doorkeeper,
all in one; and audience into the bargain.
-Julius Hare, Guesses at Truth, 1827.
I marvel that while each man loves himself more than anyone else, he often
sets less value on his own estimate than on the opinions of others.
-Marcus Aurelius.
The difference between talent and genius is, talent never says anything but which he has heard once, and genius things which he has never heard. Genius is power; talent
is applicability. -Emerson, Journals, 1843.
Intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance,
while temperate intemperance helps in its fight against
intemperate temperance.
-Mark Twain, Notebooks.
Only the shallow know themselves.
-Oscar Wilde.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant as you were
a year ago. -Bernard Berenson, Notebooks, 1892.
Politeness is a false coin: to be miserly with it shows a
want of intelligence. -Schoepenhauer, 1851.
[Since] we are made of contradictions, our freedom
is necessary. Lidian says the only sin people never forgive
each other for is a difference in opinion. - -Emerson, Journals, 1844.
Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly
transformed into total falsehoods, and then acclaimed as
revolutionary revelations.
-Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1974.
Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of
good fortune that seldom happens, as by little advantages
that occur every day.
-Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography.
In doubts about one's life, one's work, one's methods,
one's principles, one's practice, there is always living. It is
a sign of not being dead, to doubt and be discomfortable.
-John Addington Symonds, Letters & Papers.
The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality
one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men.
-Pascal, Thoughts, 1670.