KF

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Then the syncretist Ficino, sitting hunched with Lorenzo standing at his side, put all the ideas together, along with Lorenzo's new song: chariots blazing between the worlds as gods fought rebel gods, the destruction of a city -- a planet? -- by fire, beasts beyond imagining both to terrify and befriend the heroes.

"It needs a title," Signorina Scala said.

Pulci had his mouth open, but Ficino beat him to the pun.

"It shall be dedicated to Isis and Mars," he said, "and we will call it Stella Martis.”
― John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting

“but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty