The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur.

He who repents of having sinned is almost innocent.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

John Maynard Keynes

Dictators always look good until the last minutes.

Tomas G. Masaryk

Finance is not merely about making money. It's about achieving our deep goals and protecting the fruits of our labor. It's about stewardship and, therefore, about achieving the good society.

Robert J. Shiller

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

La supervivencia no es cuestión de cortesía ni de disculpas.

Stephen King

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

Vladimir Nabokov

Cincinnati is honourably famous for its free schools, of which it has so many that no person's child among its population can, by possibility, want the means of education.

Charles Dickens

I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age.

Jane Austen

The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.

Michel de Montaigne

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.

Gregory Bateson

A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car.

Carrie P. Snow