Aneece > Aneece's Quotes

“He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”
― Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“But these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby's being, in his way, rather a meditative and poetical man; loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer time; and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are... and to remark (if in good spirits) that there were old times once, and that you'd find a stone coffin or two, now, under that chapel, he'd be bound, if you was to dig for it.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“You're not racing?" joked the officer.

"Mine is a harder race," Alexei Alexandrovich replied respectfully.

And though the reply did not mean anything, the officer pretended that he had heard a clever phrase from a clever man and had perfectly understood.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“In treading upon the ashes of dead men in Italy, Egypt - on the banks of the Bosphorus, one almost despairs to think how idle are the dreams and toils of this life, and were it not for the intellectual pleasure of knowing and learning, one would almost be damaged by travel in these historic lands.”
― William T. Sherman

“The mind commands the body, and obedience is instant; the mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind tells the hand to move, and all goes so smoothly that it is hard to distinguish the command from its execution. Yet the mind is the mind, and the hand is a body. The mind tells the mind to will; one is the same as the other, and yet it does not do what it is told.”
― Saint Augustin, Confessions: Livre XI

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Whose fingers string the stalactite-
Who counts the Wampum of the night”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“If the stillness is Volcanic
In the human face
When upon a pain Titanic
Features keep their place-

If at length the smoldering anguish
Will not overcome-
And the palpitating Vinyard
In the dust, be overthrown?”
― Emily Dickinson

“At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“For getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Fourteen Points? The Good Lord only gave us Ten, and do we abide by those?”
― Georges Clemenceau

“I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!" In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
― John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi