Michael Wilson

“CHAP. XIX. The Duke Ai asked, saying, 'What should be
done in order to secure the submission of the people?'
Confucius replied, 'Advance the upright and set aside the
crooked, then the people will submit. Advance the crooked and
set aside the upright, then the people will not submit.”
― James Legge, The Chinese Classics — Volume 1: Confucian Analects

“Mrs. Piozzi, speaking of cards, in her Retrospection, published in 1801, says, "It is a well-known vulgarity in England to say, 'Come, Sir, will you have a stroke at the history of the Four Kings?' meaning, Will you play a game at cards?" A writer in Fraser's Magazine, for August, 1844, also calls cards the books of the Four Kings, as if they were well known by that name.”
― William Andrew Chatto, Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards

“The greatness of man is in being a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a transit and a sunset.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra

“All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays