S > S's Quotes

“Desiderium sinus cordis”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Care not who is richer or more learned than thou, if none be more generous and loving.”
― John Lancaster Spalding

“One cannot play fast and loose with what one knows to be true.”
― Bernard Lonergan

“The first rule of style is to have something to say. The second rule of style is to control yourself when, by chance, you have two things to say; say first one, then the other, not both at the same time.”
― George Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

“Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.”
― John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salsibury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium

“She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“Do you believe that you really have a desire to learn, or would you, had you been left alone from birth, be totally primitive and beastlike in your thoughts and feelings?”
― William H. Armstrong

“The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”
― R.G. Collingwood

“The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“To my God a heart of flame; To my fellow man a heart of love; To myself a heart of steel.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“Love is ever new because it never groweth old.”
― Saint Augustine

“The one who comes to question himself cares for mankind.”
― Kenneth Patchen

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch

“...some of the most important work that we can do as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curatorial practices, bringing together, highlighting and remixing significant ideas in existing texts than remaining solely focused on the production of more ostensibly original texts.”
― Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

“The pleasure of criticism takes away from us the pleasure of being deeply moved by very fine things.”
― Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères

“The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions

“Again, all who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold and books.”
― Richard de Bury, Philobiblon: A Treatise on the Love of Books

“Wonder is the desire of knowledge.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“87.—Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other.

[A maxim, adds Aimé Martin, "Which may enter into the code of a vulgar rogue, but one is astonished to find it in a moral treatise." Yet we have scriptural authority for it: "Deceiving and being deceived."—2 TIM. iii. 13.]”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“321.—We are nearer loving those who hate us, than those who love us more than we desire.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites.”
― Lord Acton

“The history of all love is writ with one pen.”
― William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

“To demand the absolute and to be content with absolutely nothing else results in a skepticism.”
― Bernard Lonergan

“Objects are relatively stupid. They do a few things well, as do lobsters.”
― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics

“The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single type
of propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion as not even admissible, if at all desirable. The world of these academic refuseniks is, however, a bleak and sterile place. Disarmed by their own epistemic fiat, scholars cannot assert anything since they deny the idea of objective rationality. If they arrive at an insight whose truth they wish to defend – for example that truth and rationality are passé – they can’t do so because truth and rationality are constructed to be constructed.”
― Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory

“Calisto, a companion of Ignatius, and who on recovering from a severe illness had heard of the imprisonment of Ignatius, hastened from Segnovia, where he was staying, and came to Alcala, that he, too, might be cast into prison.”
― St. Ignatius of Loyola

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction?”
― Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy

“Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden....”
― Gerard Olson