Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness?Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal.
Charles BaudelaireRelated topics
above birth discordant enough gives residence soul relations daysRelated quotes
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward and the hand may be a little child's.
George Eliot
'War,' says Machiavelli, 'ought to be the only study of a prince' and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. 'He ought,' says this great political doctor, 'to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans. 'A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.
Edmund Burke
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
Arthur Schopenhauer
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these dreams die, but others nourish and protect them nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who hope that their dreams will come true.
Woodrow Wilson
When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul.
Albert Szent-Györgyi