Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world; oh, eyes sublime
With tears and laughter for all time!

If thou must love me, let it be for nought except for love's sake only...

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach...

Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;

Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning.

Since when was genius found respectable?

Man, the two-fold creature, apprehends
The two-fold manner, in and outwardly,
And nothing in the world comes single to him.

Abraham Cowley

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.

What shall I do to be forever known,
And make the age to come my own?

His time is forever, everywhere his place.

Fond archer, Hope! who tak'st thy aim so far,
That still or short, or wide thine arrows are!

Life is an incurable disease.

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks, and gapes for drink again;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair.

Fill all the glasses there, for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?

Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape
Who dost in every country change thy shape!

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Though our works
Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this
At least is ours, to make them righteous.

Though our works
Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this
At least is ours, to make them righteous.

Fear that makes faith may break faith; and a fool Is but in folly stable.

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran…

Dream that the lips once breathless
Might quicken if they would;
Say that the soul is deathless;
Dream that the gods are good;
Say March may wed September,
And time divorce regret;
But not that you remember,
And not that I forget.

It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time,
Who swims in sight of the great third wave
That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.

James Russell Lowell

Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.

All thoughts that mould the age begin
Deep down within the primitive soul.

The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.

Is true Freedom but to break
Fetters for our own dear sake,
And, with leathern hearts, forget
That we owe mankind a debt?

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.

The wisest man could ask no more of Fate
Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,
Safe from the Many — honored by the Few;
To count as naught in World or Church or State;
But inwardly in secret to be great.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man;
Great souls are portions of eternity.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Everything is happy now,
Everything is upward striving;

John Dryden

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Death in itself is nothing; but we fear
To be we know not what, we know not where.

Whatever is, is in its causes just.

If others in the same Glass better see
'Tis for Themselves they look, but not for me:
For my Salvation must its Doom receive
Not from whatothers, but what I believe.

There is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the Head from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place.

Let those find fault whose wit's so very small,
They've need to show that they can think at all;
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls, must dive below.

Lionel Trilling

The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.

At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.

A real book reads us.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

The factory was not made for man but man for the factory.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

Jean Cocteau

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model...

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time...

You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death...

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.

Nikolai Gogol

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

I shall laugh my bitter laugh.

What is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind...

Since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?

What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!

And for a long time yet, led by some wondrous power, I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from the sea through your entire expanse?... And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?

The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.

What a dreary world we live in, gentlemen.

Robertson Davies

Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance, and has so far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom.

Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.

Applause we crave, from scorn we take defence
But have no armour 'gainst indifference.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

One might think, to hear some people talk, that this had been a particularly fine summer. From their point of view, I suppose, it has.

The King had every privilege except that of being at ease. Pompadour provided the atmosphere in which that final luxury was possible.

O, how deeply we should thank God for these impossible people like Berlioz and Dylan Thomas! What a weary, grey, well-ordered, polite, unendurable hell this would be without them!

As the cat is, above all animals, the writer's pet, I suppose I should have written something about it. But I do not care about "weeks", and every week is a cat week with me.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature. The reasons for such addiction are so many that I suspect they are never the same in any two cases.

Sometimes there was a serious article on a hot topic, and I especially remember one by a bishop headed "Is Nudity Salacious?"

I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is its symbol. It is a powerful god indeed but it is what the students of ancient gods called a shape-shifter, and sometimes a trickster.

Neal Stephenson

Any strategy that involves crossing a valley — accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance — will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.”
“So?”
“Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?