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#1

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

tags: catholic, politics, religion, tradition

487 likes

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#2

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.”
― Khalil Gibran

tags: love

641 likes

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#3

“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
― Stephen King

1149 likes

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#4

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

7563 likes

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#5

“I only drink on two occasions—when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.”
― Brendan Behan

12 likes

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#6

“Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.”
― Goethe

768 likes

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#7

“But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

tags: bitten, broken, destroyed, entwine, federico-garcia-lorca, love, mouth, sonnet-of-the-garland-of-roses, soul

425 likes

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#8

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

tags: psychology

335 likes

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#9

“God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly”
― Paul Valéry

tags: adam-and-eve, aloneness, god, man, solitude

87 likes

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#10

“An author's first duty is to let down his country.”
― Brendan Behan

5 likes

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#11

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
― Henry James, Theory of Fiction: Henry James

tags: adversity, life, perseverance, struggle

232 likes

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#12

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

tags: books, power

3336 likes

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#13

“Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

392 likes

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#14

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

tags: image, self

208 likes

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#15

“This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: love

257 likes

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#16

“Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.”
― Giacomo Leopardi

tags: ageing, aging, death

72 likes

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#17

“We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 28: The Illustrated London News, 1908-1910

tags: brotherhood-of-man, interdependence, loyalty

464 likes

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#18

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”
― Andre Breton

tags: relationships

224 likes

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#19

“From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)”
― Gustave Flaubert

tags: history, humanity, life, mankind

37 likes

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#20

“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”
― Charles Dickens

tags: homecoming

934 likes

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#21

“The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.”
― Giacomo Leopardi

tags: knowledge

1163 likes

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#22

“What I learned on my own I still remember”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

tags: academia, discovery, education, intelligence, learning, reading, schooling, thinking, thought

221 likes

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#23

“The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

180 likes

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#24

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

tags: relationships

1533 likes

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#25

“Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

14 likes

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#26

“But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

37 likes

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#27

“Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.”
― Rene Descartes

tags: common-sense, humor, irony

371 likes

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#28

“...the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.”
― Paul Valéry

15 likes

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#29

“Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

49 likes

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#30

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
― John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous: Essays

tags: capitalism, poverty

83 likes

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