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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 21fc5b1 | But the kings of modern times, restrained by the limits of mere probability, have neither courage nor desire. They fear the eat that hears their orders, and the eye that scrutinizes their actions. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 401c2c8 | He has not recovered the blow?" said he to Athos. He is struck to death." Oh! your fears exaggerate, I hope. Raoul is of a tempered nature. Around all hearts as noble as his, there is a second envelope that forms a cuirass. The first bleeds, the second resists." No," replied Athos, "Raoul will die of it." _Mordioux!_" said D'Artagnan, in a melancholy tone. And he did not add a word to this exclamation. Then, a minute after, "Why do you let .. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 0fa4f84 | Do you think that, if I did, I would lead you to the answer inch by inch, like a dramatist or a novelist? | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 5b3f329 | paleness is always looked upon as a strong proof of aristocratic descent and distinguished breeding. | distinguished paleness | Alexandre Dumas | |
| 0233737 | dh qlt nn~ lm '`d 'fkr bh 'kwn kdhb .. wlkn~ mn 'wly'k ldhyn ymDwn blqTy`@ wlbGD l~ 'qS~ Hdwdhm. | Alexandre Dumas-fils | ||
| da7ce38 | but he laughed as the English do at the end of his teeth. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| c4d5ad1 | You who weep for pleasures fled, While dragging on a life of care, All your woes will melt in air, If to god your tears are shed, You who Weap! | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 27af5a4 | Happiness even makes the wicked good. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| cbf0918 | But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 330a016 | There are men who have suffered and who have not only gone on living, but even built a new fortune on the ruins of their former happiness. From the depths into which their enemies have plunged them, they have risen again with such vigor and glory that they have dominated their former conquerors and cast them down in their turn. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| dd2a30b | I say, sir, you sir, who are hiding yourself behind that shutter--yes, you, sir, tell me what you are laughing at, and we will laugh together! | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 36ea6e8 | I was delighted to see you again, and forgot for the moment that all happiness is fleeting. | joy reunion | Alexandre Dumas | |
| 56f1f4f | My lord," said D'Artagnan, "Monsieur de Vallon [Porthos] is like me, he prefers service extraordinary--that is to say, enterprises that are considered mad and impossible." | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| c4aa1d7 | You posses a quality which can never belong to Mademoiselle Danglars. It is that indefinable charm which is to a woman what perfume is to the flower and flavor to the fruit, for beauty of either is not the only quality we seek. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 81c531c | Instruction is good for a child; but example is worth more. | children example lead-by-example parenting raising-children role-models teaching youth | Alexandre Dumas | |
| 8f3061e | I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I'm only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way. | Frank Portman | ||
| e3feda7 | I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I'd ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he le.. | Frank Portman | ||
| ea7af53 | Broad-Based Education: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.... I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.... It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it.. | inspirational | George Beahm | |
| 7ee63b4 | To make this condition mathematically clearer, it is convenient to assert it in the form that the space-time can be continued smoothly, as a conformal manifold, a little way prior to the hypersurface . To before the Big Bang? Surely not: the Big Bang is supposed to represent the beginning of all things, so there can be no 'before'. Never fear--this is just a mathematical trick. The extension is not supposed to have any physical meaning! Or .. | Roger Penrose | ||
| 99a5d97 | But clearly, the lesson is that incentives can be a dangerous weapon. A critic of this research might say that the problem is not incentives, but dumb incentives. No doubt, some incentives are dumber than others. But no incentives can ever be smart enough to substitute for people who do the right thing because it's the right thing. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 2b1cf47 | Knowing what's good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for "good enough"; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas; Then apply that strategy more broadly." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| ad28f9a | And so this is where the post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| d7f3339 | Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall .. | business capitalism capitalist character warren-buffett | Roger Lowenstein | |
| 35870a1 | A year earlier, no company had been accorded more faith than Enron; by late November, none was trusted less. And so, a gasping gurgle, a desperate SOS: Enron, the emblem of free markets, the champion of deregulation, reached into its depleted treasury and forked over $100,000 to each of the major political parties' campaign war chests. Then, it shuttered its online trading unit - its erstwhile gem. On November 28, Standard & Poor's downgrad.. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| ffc9978 | The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But wh.. | Simon Schama | ||
| a83d3d7 | I stood up. Can a man stand alone, naked, and at his ease, wrist flexed at his side like Michelangelo's David, without assistance, without diversion, without drink, without friends, without a woman, in silence? Yes. It was possible to stand. Nothing happened. I listened. There was no sound: no boats on the river, no trucks on the road, not even cicadas. What if I didn't listen to the news? I didn't. Nothing happened. I realized I had been a.. | Walker Percy | ||
| ab74830 | The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to. | Walker Percy | ||
| 8ffbf8a | What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious. | Walker Percy | ||
| c5b969d | Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs--what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.--is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe. | Walker Percy | ||
| ed9dcab | the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption. | Walker Percy | ||
| eb66966 | In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which is n.. | Walker Percy | ||
| 20bb239 | Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience. | existentialism experience genuineness the-self | Walker Percy | |
| a2b637a | God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. | Walker Percy | ||
| c0d4e3a | How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful. | Walker Percy | ||
| d20975d | The self has no sign of itself... For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos. | Walker Percy | ||
| bfedd3f | In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are. | Walker Percy | ||
| 519aa22 | In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. | Walker Percy | ||
| 375dbd8 | The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes. | Walker Percy | ||
| d89fb6c | the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver. | Walker Percy | ||
| f3ee4f1 | But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all. | Walker Percy | ||
| 997f4c4 | No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy. | James Lee Burke | ||
| c9c38f3 | and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven. | folly gifts heaven mistakes-man-makes | James Lee Burke | |
| 6211a26 | If I've learned anything at all from my years, it's the simple lesson that human beings are always more complicated, brave, long-suffering, and, ultimately, heroic than we ever guessed, and that none of us completely understands another, no matter how intimate we are with them. | James Lee Burke | ||
| 350052f | I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice. | wisdom | James Lee Burke |