Ben

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Ben’s Quotes

“We're actors — we're the opposite of people!”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

tags: actors, archetypes, humanity, humor, people, symbolism, theatre

310 likes

“Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

113 likes

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: emphasis, exclamation-points, style, writing

1891 likes

“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

[Letter to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

tags: atheism, baron-d-holbach, condorcet, d-alembert, d-holbach, deism, denis-diderot, diderot, jean-le-rond-d-alembert, marquis-de-condorcet, paul-henri-d-holbach, platonic, platonic-christianity, protestant

492 likes

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

tags: ambivalence, ambivalent, hopeless, hopelessness, implausible, impossible, inner-conflict, intelligence, opposing-views

614 likes

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