Aneece

“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

“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

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

“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