Alexander

“The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past, Dante, Titian, Shakespeare, Spinoza, is to treat them not with reverence, but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries. Thus we pay them the highest compliment we can; our familiarity acknowledges that they are alive for us.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

“Why do we say that time passes away, when we do not say with just as much emphasis that it arises?”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“A mind that sees no path or direction to flee despair can be expanded nevertheless. Who can say if expansion may not one day make despair sufferable?”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“…he is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his Head, which is all the more interesting for a little Twist in the Brains. [on Sir Thomas Browne]”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge