Nathan

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies.”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Through the lofty arched windows the Kaiser saw God's sun rising. He crossed himself and genuflected. Since time immemorial he had seen the sun come up every morning. Most of his life he had gotten up first, just as a soldier gets up earlier than his superior. He knew all sunrises, the fiery and cheery ones in summer and the late, dreary, foggy ones in winter. And while he no longer recalled the dates, or the names of the days, the months, the years when disaster or good fortune had overtaken him, he did remember every morning that had ushered in an important day in his life. And he knew that a certain morning had been dismal and another cheerful. And every morning, he had crossed himself and genuflected, the way some trees open their leaves to the sun every morning, whether on a day of storm or a felling ax or deadly frost in spring or else days of peace and warmth and life.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March