Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will of renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.
—Antonin Sertillanges (French Catholic Philosopher)
Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.
—Elfriede Jelinek (Austrian Author)
When you want to test the depths of a stream, don’t use both feet.
—Chinese Proverb
Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world—it is thin.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (American Poet)
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
—Reinhold Niebuhr (American Theologian)
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
—Charles Baudelaire (French Poet)
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
—William Hazlitt (English Essayist)
Nought venture nought have.
—John Heywood
A house of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living in.
—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Italian Author)
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
—Charlie Chaplin (British Actor)
He who invokes history is always secure. The dead will not rise to witness against him.
—Czeslaw Milosz (Polish-American Poet, Novelist)
To be always intending to live a new life, but never to find time to set about it; this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day and night to another, till he is starved and destroyed.
—John Tillotson