From a little spark may burst a flame.
He is poor indeed that can promise nothing.
Thomas Fuller
Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.
Christopher Hitchens
Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.
Be the business never so painful, you may have it done for money.
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way.
Riches enlarge rather than satisfy appetites.
He is rich that is satisfied.
I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' You're the television? Or someone in the television?' The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said.
Neil Gaiman
Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers
Stephen Bayley
The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
Aldous Huxley
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest,
Christopher Morley
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
e. e. (Edward Estlin) cummings
The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
Plato
Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating. If a woman wears a high-heeled shoe it changes the apparent musculature of the leg so that you get an effect of twanging sinew, of tension needing to be released. Her bottom sticks out like an offering. At the same time, the lofty perch is an expression of vulnerability, she is effectively hobbled and unable to escape. There is something arousing about this declaration that she is prepared to sacrifice function for form.
As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.
Stephen Bayley, Commerce and Cul
You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
James Agee
The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.
Steve Jobs
In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
Russell Baker, "New York Times",
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the
Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.
Herman Wouk, "Time", On his retu
All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?
Dorothy Parker, Horsie
There were some memories, though, that never faded.
Cassandra Clare
Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly, with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your profession.
Isaac Watts
Do not judge by appearances; a rich heart may be under a poor coat.
Scottish Proverb
If you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. An likewise, if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.
Meister Eckhart
I don't want you to be the victim of circumstance, I want you to be the owner of the moment.
Steve Maraboli
I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately the resemblance doesn't end there.
Groucho Marx
In avoiding the appearance of evil, I am not sure but I have sometimes unnecessarily deprived myself and others of innocent enjoyments.
Rutherford B. Hayes, In Rutherfo
Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Henry David Thoreau
Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.
Stephen Bayley, Taste, pt. 1, Ta
The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
Travel is never a matter of money but of courage
Paulo Coelho
The world is governed more by appearances than by realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
Daniel Webster
There was an Old Man with a beard,Who said, 'It is just as I feared! -Two Owls and a Hen,Four Larks and a Wren,Have all built their nests in my beard!'
Edward Lear, Book of Nonsense
You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters- all that matters, really- is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest- women, art, success- is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
Albert Camus
We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.
W. R. [William Ralph] Inge
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