Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,”
― W. B. Yeats

“And Gilles, menacing and aloof, rides through the deserted villages with their sobbing, shuttered buildings. His impunity seems assured, what peasant would be mad enough to challenge a seignior capable of having him strung up at the drop of a hat?

'And just as the lowly born renounce bringing him to justice, his peers have no intention of seeking to bring him down for the sale of a load of peasants whom they openly despise...

'There is only one power which can rise above such feudal imbalances and earthly interests, only one power which avenges the oppressed and the weak; that of the Church. And it is indeed , the Church, in the person of Jean de Malestroit, which challenges the monster and fells him.”
― J-K Huysmans

“What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can't even be sure of this. In fact, his biographers have to admit they don't know much at all, and that, judging from appearances - at least between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three - he did absolutely nothing.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The weather had just become perfect; it was one of the dozen exquisite days of the English year — days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap.”
― Henry James

“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.”
― kenneth rexroth

“The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions, which time and mediocrity can resolve.”
― H.R. Trevor-Roper

“Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...

-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark”
― M.R. James, A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories

“Belize: Hell or heaven?

[Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance]

Belize: Like San Francisco.

Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.

Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.

Roy Cohn: Isaiah.

Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.

Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde.

Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.

Roy Cohn: And Heaven?

Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”
― Groucho Marx

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

[Thoughts on Various Subjects]”
― Jonathan Swift , Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

“If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”
― Montaigne

“Femme Fatale: Haven't I seen you somewhere before?
Rigby Reardon: Maybe. I've been somewhere before.
~ "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid”
― Steve Martin - "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid"

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
― Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”
― John Cowper Powys

“You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride... Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
― C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Illustrated