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The chief cause of anxiety to honest Wolfert, however, was the growing prosperity of the city. The expenses of living doubled and trebled; but he could not double and treble the magnitude of his cabbages; and the number of competitors prevented the increase of price; thus, therefore, while every one around him grew richer, Wolfert grew poorer[.]

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

It is a great error to judge someone (worse, to hold them in contempt) solely on their behavior at their weakest moments. Every single person dead or alive judged in that manner would end up damned.

What you allow to move you: that is your belief in God or in some second-rate substitute.

The story of Noah, like all the ancient stories we will consider, is thus not an argument for the existence of God, rendered against the doubt of believer and unbeliever alike, but a description of what is to be held properly in the very highest of places, so that the continuation of man, society, and world may be ensured.

Everyone has sufficient reason for evil.

All the crucial decisions of life are made on principle, not in consequence of sufficient evidence.

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.

I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away.

“The king who fights his people fights himself. And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke that strikes them dead is as my death to me.” - King Arthur

“It was the time when first the question rose about the founding of a Table Round, that was to be, for love of God and men and noble deeds, the flower of all the world.” - Merlin

In a hollow land, from which old fires have broken, men may fear fresh fire and ruin.

O purblind race of miserable men, how many among us at this very hour do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, by taking true for false, or false for true; here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world groping, how many, until we pass and reach that other, where we see as we are seen!

“[…] who swept the dust of ruin’d Rome from off the threshold of the realm, and crush’d the Idolators, and made the people free? Who should be King save him who makes us free?”

“O Mother, how can you keep me tether’d to you—Shame. Man am I grown, a man’s work I must do. Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King, live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King—else, wherefore born?”

“But that is the way people are. They want people to be talented—which is already something out of the ordinary. But when it comes to the other qualities which go with the talents—and perhaps are essential to them—oh, no, they don’t care for these at all, they refuse to have any understanding of them.”

To him who has looked upon the night of death and known its secret sweets, to him day never can be aught but vain, nor can he know a longing save for night, eternal, real, in which he is made one with love.

“Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all godliness and all abiding significance.

He knows that history professors do not love history because it is something that comes to pass, but only because it is something that has come to pass; that they hate a revolution like the present one because they feel it is lawless, incoherent, irrelevant—in a word, unhistoric; that their hearts belong to the coherent, disciplined, historic past.

He knew by experience that this was love. And he was accurately aware that love would surely bring him much pain, affliction, and sadness, that it would certainly destroy his peace, filling his heart to overflowing with melodies which would be no good to him because he would never have the time or tranquility to give them permanent form.

[…] passion paralyses good taste and makes its victim accept with rapture what a man in his senses would either laugh at or turn from with disgust.

Passion is like crime: it does not thrive on the established order and the common round; it welcomes every blow dealt the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric, because therein it feels a sure hope of its own advantage.

For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence.

For in almost every artist nature is inborn a wanton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out aristocratic pretensions and pay them homage.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Development is destiny; and why should a career attended by the applause and adulation of the masses necessarily take the same course as one which does not share the glamour and the obligations of fame? Only the incorrigible bohemian smiles or scoffs when a man of transcendent gifts outgrows his carefree prentice stage, recognizes his own worth and forces the world to recognize it too and pay it homage[…]

Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable—it is sympathy.

For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate influence which shall also be deep and lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of his contemporaries in general. Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another.