Leslie

“Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.”
― Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

“Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.”
― Samuel Johnson

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest