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I knew, vaguely, that just as the world contained forces that nurtured and strengthened and created things, there were also forces that diminished them. And that even though there were equal amounts of both, the latter could sometimes seem more powerful.

There hath been but one cause for all these evils, my lord, and it resolves itself into the mysterious duplicity with which you, have been induced to surround yourself. Extricate yourself at once, my lord, from the tyranny of these disgraceful trammels. Be like a true English gentleman, knight, and earl, who holds that truth is the foundation of honour, and that honour is dear to him as the breath of his nostrils.

But I fear for thee, Walter [Raleigh]” (and he wiped his honest eye), “I fear for thee with all my heart. These court-tricks, and gambols, and flashes of fine women's favour are the tricks and trinkets that bring fair fortunes to
farthings, and fine faces and witty coxcombs to the acquaintance of dull
block and sharp axes.”

But there is more to be learned from these old conifers than platitudes about overcoming adversity. Studies of aging in Great Basin bristlecone pine have found, remarkably, that evidence of senescence -- a degenerative aging process leading to death -- seems nowhere to be found.

Be not so rash, good sir, and cast not yourself away because a woman -- to be brief -- is a woman, and changes her lovers like her suit of ribands, with no better reason than mere phantasy.

Ancient bristlecone pines have been a problem for 'young earth creationists who take the biblical account of creation literally. They believe that Noah's flood occurred about 4,000 years ago. Yet there was one bristlecone which had at least 4,862 annual rings when felled in 1964.

I name to you freely the engines, the springs, the screws, the tackle, and braces, by which great men rise in stirring times.... He has the more need to have those about him who are unscrupulous in his service, and who, because they know that his fall will overwhelm and crush them, must wager both blood and brain, soul and body, in order to keep him aloft.

The fame of [this writer's] likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for his history it will soon limit his life story to the dash between two dates.

"This is how we live," she said a few times. She wanted to show us everything at once. We went to the garden, inspected the vegetables, the grapes, here's the cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, we repeating after her, because we had come from afar and might not know what these things were.

There on his Imperial throne, but without the diadem or the purple, sat the aged [Emperor Anastasius] (he was now 81 years of age), and seemed by his helpless attitude to enquire what was [the mob's] will.The mob shouted that the two prefects, Marinus and Plato, should be thrown to the wild beasts.

To reign on such terms, to be the master of millions of slaves, was comparatively an easy task, when once the nation had become used to the clank of its fetters. But to maintain for generations, to prolong into the strangely different world of modern society ,,, this has been a great and marvelous work

The Ostrogoths were that member of the great east German family of nations which first attained to widely extended dominion. Through the greater part of the third century after Christ theirs was the chief controlling influence in the vast plains between the Baltic and the [Black Sea]....

—You know what Trump is?
—Tell me.
—He's Putin's shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order.

After prolonged back-to-back stints overseas I am savoring a well-deserved spell of home leave. A cloud looms over my professional life that I am doing my best to ignore.

... this enigma called 'love'. I see the image of it receding and curling away from me in an infinite series like the waves of the sea; or, colder than a dead moon, rising up over the dreams and illusions I fabricated from it -- but, like the real moon, always keeping one side of the truth from me, the nether side of a beautiful dead star.

Pursewarden: "You see, Justine, I believe that Gods are men and men Gods; they intrude on each other's lives, trying to express themselves through each other -- hence such apparent confusion in our human states of mind, our intimations of powers within or beyond us."

Peddyrasty is one thing -- hashish quite another

The portrait of Nero is a study in degeneration -- a proof (if one is needed) that absolute power corrupts absolutely. He begins with gifts of intelligence and taste, and has had a good education in the charge of Seneca.

A herd of elephants could eat an acre of trees in a day, leaving behind a mass of trampled and splintered limbs, yet that acre stayed green and grew back. But this human settlement was befouled, the greenery slashed and burned, or dragged away until only dirt and stones remained -- a blight, a permanent disfigurement.

‘What kind of funeral was it?’ says the formal lady, when he returns
home. ‘Oh!’ replies the formal gentleman, ‘there never was such a gross
and disgusting impropriety; there were no feathers.’ ‘No feathers!’
cries the lady, as if on wings of black feathers dead people fly to
Heaven, and, lacking them, they must of necessity go elsewhere.

The theatrical young gentleman would prefer going a street or two out of his way, to omitting to pass a stage-entrance, into which he looks with a curious and searching eye. If he can identify a popular actor in the street, he is in a transport of delight; and no sooner meets him, than he hurries back, and walks a few paces in front of him, so that he can turn round, and have a good stare at his features.

Matrimony is proverbially a serious undertaking. Like an over-weening
predilection for brandy-and-water, it is a misfortune into which a man
easily falls, and from which he finds it remarkably difficult to
extricate himself. It is of no use telling a man who is timorous on
these points, that it is but one plunge, and all is over.

‘All I’ve got to say is this here: You sit quietly down in that chair, and I’ll sit hoppersite you here, and if you keep quiet and don’t stir, I won’t damage you; but, if you move hand or foot till half-past twelve o’clock, I shall alter the expression of your countenance so completely, that the next time you
look in the glass you’ll ask vether you’re gone out of town, and ven
you’re likely to come back again.’

There were two classes of created objects which he held in the deepest and most unmingled horror; these were dogs, and children. He was not unamiable, but he could, at any time, have viewed the execution of a dog, or the assassination of an infant, with the liveliest satisfaction. Their habits were at variance with his love of order; and his love of order was as powerful as his love of life.

There are strange chords in the human heart, which will lie dormant
through years of depravity and wickedness, but which will vibrate at
last to some slight circumstance apparently trivial in itself, but
connected by some undefined and indistinct association, with past days
that can never be recalled, and with bitter recollections from which
the most degraded creature in existence cannot escape.

We have often wondered how many months’ incessant travelling in a
post-chaise it would take to kill a man; and wondering by analogy, we
should very much like to know how many months of constant travelling in a succession of early coaches, an unfortunate mortal could endure.
Breaking a man alive upon the wheel, would be nothing to breaking his
rest, his peace, his heart.

These three beliefs—being decisive equals making decisions quickly, faster is always better, we should behave like computers—come together to form the very dangerous idea that the kind of thinking business managers should be using all the time is fast, purposive, deliberate, logical, computer-type thinking, and that this mode of thought represents the highest intellectual achievement of man.

The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America's real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The truth is deep, cousin, and shifts, and runs away into the cracks, like the little balls of mercury we played with as children.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.