I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
~ Gertrude Stein
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I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
~ Gertrude Stein
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In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
~ T.S. Eliot
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History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw.
~ George Santayana
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The institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will always disagree.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one’s own nervous system.
~ Arthur Koestler
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Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
~ John Steinbeck
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The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse.
~ Herta Müller
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The tragedy of Steve Bannon is that when he leaves the White House, he’s known as the great manipulator, the intellectual heavy of the international populist uprising. But still he ends up in the fetal position at Donald Trump’s feet.
~ Sam Nunberg via American Rasputin
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The celebrity never sees himself. I have some idea what I’m doing on that stage; above all, I have some idea what sustains me on that stage. But the celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would’ve had to become a celebrity in order to survive.
~ James Baldwin
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