Enock Ulle

“Authorities are the ruination of great talents, and form almost the entire talent of mediocrities. They are the leading strings with which everyone learns to walk at the beginning of their careers, but they almost always leave a permanent mark. People like Ingres never get them out of their systems and never take a step without invoking their help. It is as though they wished to eat bread and milk all their lives (Monday 10th October 1853)”
― Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

“Our society is much more alienated from the theology than it is from the philosophy of Christianity. As our religious beliefs have become less strong and our view of the life hereafter less clear, morality has become more concerned with the legitimacy of material needs and pleasures. This is the idea that I think the followers of Saint-Simon expressed by saying that the flesh must be rehabilitated. It is probably the same tendency that, for some time now, appears in the writings and in the doctrines of our moral philosophers.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution & Correspondence With Gobineau

“Modern love is complicated, 複雜, a term that is even more complicated in Chinese, used as it is for anything too difficult to explain, tackle or resolve, much like the state of our city in these times. Umbrellas foster revolutions and filibustering passes for a political process. To be 複雜 is almost to deny resolution. Perhaps we are afraid of the possible outcome, and to deny ... what is it we deny? Accountability? Fault? Responsibility?”
― Xu Xi, Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy to a City

“We might flatter ourselves that we represent an improvement on animals. But all we gained was the knowledge of death, an incurable wound in our intimacy with the world.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins