Pliny the Younger
- Pliny the Younger on chariot racing
The races are on, a spectacle which has not the slightest attraction for me. It lacks novelty and variety. If you have seen it once, then there is nothing left for you to see. So it amazes me that thousands and thousands of grown men should act like children, wanting to look at horses running and men standing on chariots over and over again. If it was the speed of the horses or the skill of the drivers that attracted them, there would be some sense in it - but in fact it is simply the color.
Hisperic
- The mouse
I saw today, on the platform of a small hot air balloon I noticed on the street, a tiny mouse playing a tiny piano. I realized its music was causing all the joy and sadness in the world.
Hisperic
- On sacrifice
Sacrifice is the sole criterion of worth. Love cries out for blood. In some measure, a nation is something worth dying for because it is something for which people have died.
Hisperic
- On English
I love the twist and agility of English sentences, and their capacity to quickly jump and fall, like flying swallows, between pews of Saxon plainness and Latinate vaults of abstraction.
Hisperic
- On life
Man is not on earth to work like a beast, and not on earth to enjoy himself like a beast either. The sober attitude to life is wary ambivalence, suspicion flecked with nebulous wonder. Thirst for life and it will strangle you.
Hisperic
- On fallibility
It's very possible to end up in pathetic and humiliating situations without being a pathetic and contemptible person. Everyone has holes in their dignity large enough to fall into given the right circumstance. Remember this if you are feeling wretched.
Hisperic
- On solutions
I try not to get frustrated by the proposition of foolish solutions for complex problems, because nothing is simple, and everything is a mess, and it's supremely easy to get things wrong. We all deserve each other's patience and charity.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
- Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence
In the last few decades, a terribly pernicious rumor has been circulated by the press. It claims, exhibiting a level of stupidity heretofore considered impossible, that a human being could crawl through the arteries of a blue whale. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. I do not know why this deleterious rumor has been systematically repeated, but its very existence is an ugly cancer upon the face of science.
Leo Tolstoy
- Reminiscences of Tolstoy
I used to believe that there was a green stick on which words were carved that would destroy all the evil in the hearts of men and bring them everything good, and I still believe today that there is such a truth, that it will be revealed to men, and will fulfill its promise.
Joseph de Maistre
- St. Petersburg Dialogues
The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
Ernst Jünger
- Storm of Steel
The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.
Vladimir Nabokov
- Lolita
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Gary Provost
- 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony.
Paul Bowles
- The Sheltering Sky
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
