John Ervin > John 's Quotes

“If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a correspondence bewteen the measure of individual elements and the appearance of the work as a whole.”
― Vitruvius

“Must this with farce and folly rack my
head unpunish'd ? that with sing-song,
Whine me dead?”
― Juvenal

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour no, even as these trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temples self, so does the moon, the passion posey, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls and bound to us so fast, that wheather there be shine, or gloom o'er cast, They always must be with us, or we die.”
― Keats John

“There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.”
― Blaise Pascal

“That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.”
― Euripides, Trojan Women

“A man in love once never is out of love again”
― Eureka VonMims

“philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.”
― Nietzsche/Friedrich

“Devils so work that things which are not, appear to men as if they were real.”
― Lactantius, The Works Of Lactantius V1

“For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.”
― Moses Maimonides

“Our Euripides the human,
With his droppings of warm tears,
and his touchings of things common
Till they rose to meet the spheres.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“I'll betide thee, say I, and may the Gods, or at least the Athenians, confound thee for a vile citizen and a vile third-rate actor! Read the evidence.”
― Demosthenes

“An Ass put on a Lion's skin and went
About the foreset with much merriment,
Scaring the foolish beasts by brooks and rocks,
Till at last he tried to scare the Fox. But Reynard, hearing from beneath the mane
That Raucous voice so petulant and vain,
Remarked. O' Ass, I too would run away,
But that I know your old familiar bray'.
That's just the way with asses, just the way.”
― Aesop

“Nothing can be more notorious than the calumnies and invectives with which the wisest measures and most virtuous characters of The United States have been pursued and traduced [By American Newspapers]”
― Thurgood Marshall

“It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.”
― Franz Kafka

“Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing him, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights-it is a crime against all humanity.”
― Armando Valladares

“Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.
i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.”
― Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006

“The Prayer of the Middle-Aged Man

Amid the doctors in the Temple at twelve, between mother & host at Cana implored too soon, in the middle of disciples, the midst of the mob, between High-Priest and Procurator, among the occupiers,
between the malefactors, and 'stetit in medio, et dixit, pax vobis' and 'ascensit ad mediam Personarum et caelorum,' dear my Lord,mercy a sinner nailed dead-centre too, pray not to late,-
for also Ezra stood between the seven & the six, restoring the new Law.”
― John Berryman, Delusions, Etc.

“Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.”
― Euripides

“Normalization takes place not because there is Western-ideology that normalizes third-world texts in any special way (other than the usual play with exoticism) but because this academic seeks to domesticate everything, even Marx.”
― Aijaz Ahmad

“That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.”
― W.E.H. Lecky, The Map of Life, Conduct, and Character

“Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges”
― Terence

“It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.”
― Montaigne

“The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for things it sees all the time.”
― Cicero

“1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the Way.”
― Miyamoto Musashi

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”
― Maximilien de Robespierre