The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.

Denn ich ohne Bücher bin nicht ich.

Christa Wolf

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Christopher Hitchens

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

Janet Fitch

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Ernest Hemingway

Now that I'm a mom, I'm way more laid back. If you come into my house, don't look for a coaster. Forget it. There is not a piece of furniture in my house now that is too precious.

Angela Kinsey

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Sigmund Freud

The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.

Epictetus

You have to understand that crew members make movies so they're seeing a lot of actors all the time in their career acting.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.

Edward Dahlberg

If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!

Charles Dickens

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds:

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe.

Rumi