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“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
― The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
― The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― The Thief's Journal
― The Thief's Journal
“It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.”
― 2666
― 2666
“It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through - I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer.”
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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
― Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
A Canon of Non-Fiction
— 8 members
— last activity Oct 08, 2013 10:57PM
I'd like to put together a provisional canon of great works of non-fiction. Specifically, what are the best written, most engaging and influential boo ...more
Jorge Luis Borges
— 120 members
— last activity Jun 30, 2012 07:07AM
Borges, of all the authors, does not yet have a group on Goodreads. What? He does. Now.
The Year of Reading Proust
— 1634 members
— last activity Mar 29, 2025 09:41AM
2013 was the year for reading—or re-reading—Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time for many of us. However, these th ...more
The BURIED Book Club
— 961 members
— last activity Feb 27, 2026 06:22PM
TODAY BOOKS ARE NOT BURNED. THEY ARE BURIED. WE SHALL UNEARTH THEM.
Muzzy’s 2025 Year in Books
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