Habit is Heaven’s own redress: it takes the place of happiness.
~ Aleksandr Pushkin
:::
Habit is Heaven’s own redress: it takes the place of happiness.
~ Aleksandr Pushkin
:::
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.
~ Jonathan Swift
:::
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
~ Toni Morrison
:::
Taking offense has become America’s national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.
~ George Will
:::
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.
~ Umberto Eco
:::
They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.
~ Anton Chekhov
:::
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
~ H. L. Mencken
:::
Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you’re doing it, because learning is what matters.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
~ T.S. Eliot
:::
Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards.
~ Norbert Wiener
:::