Ruan

“Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.”
― Robert Graves, Conversations with Robert Graves

“[...] after Spinoza, philosophers know that they are using language to clarify language, like cutters using diamonds to shape other diamonds. Language is seen no longer as a road to demonstrable truth, but as a spiral or gallery of mirrors bringing the intellect back to its point of departure.”
― George Steiner

“Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.”
― George Steiner