Tyler

“The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility”
― E.M. Forester, Howards End

“The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. “I suppose they will all want dignity,” I said. “I suppose,” said O’Hare.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And yet, just as our body would burst asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere were removed from it, so would the arrogance of men expand, if not to the point of bursting then to that of the most unbridled folly, indeed madness, if the pressure of want, toil, calamity and frustration were removed from their life. One can even say that we require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, in order to keep on a straight course.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness: they are in Pope's words: For ever reading, never to be read.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms