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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b99eb92 | Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world | fire greed reminders smoke | Sy Montgomery | |
| 0f94180 | In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals "are not brethren, they are not underlings" but beings "gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear." They are, he writes, "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth." | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 9aca5d7 | As with a child, to commune with Athena demands a level of openness and intuition greater than that used in the usual discourse between adult humans of a common culture. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 0fad267 | If the person was out of the room, the octopus would pull off the magnet on the inside of the tank which, with another magnet on the outside of the tank, held a glass-cleaning tool in place. The outside magnet would then crash loudly to the ground, summoning the human much as one might call a butler by ringing a servant's bell. Ceph keeper Nancy King | Sy Montgomery | ||
| a8e0fea | The bliss of stroking an octopus's head is difficult to convey to most people, even to animal lovers. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 21820bf | Karma is choice. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| e458d18 | throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. | James K. Morrow | ||
| 6390955 | one day the world will notice that while E=mc2 ultimately gives you 177,000 dead Japanese civilians, F=ma lets you skate across a frozen lake on a winter's night, the wind caressing your face as you glide toward the hot-chocolate stand on the far shore. | James K. Morrow | ||
| 0b60217 | The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic. | James K. Morrow | ||
| c309bbf | Face it, people, there is more to your malaise than celestial mechanics. If you want to know why you feel so bad, you must look beyond universal gravitation. | James K. Morrow | ||
| 6391e23 | Let's admit it, people: nobody understands consciousness. Psychology hasn't had a Newton yet. | James K. Morrow | ||
| 1c96762 | The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn. | James K. Morrow | ||
| e6b6225 | I was examined yesterday,' he remarked at last. 'It was worth while undergoing the gene of it to know that one was perfectly fit.' Philip noticed that he still used a French word in an affected way when an English one would have served. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| bba3ae4 | Beauty does not look with good grace on the timid advances of Humour. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ae140e5 | one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless. It | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ff5dd75 | Martha I thought you loved her. Bernard Enough to want her happiness above all things. Martha You are forty-five, aren't you? I forgot that for a moment. Bernard Dear Martha. You have such an attractive way of putting things. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| db5919a | You're so sharp you'll cut yourself if you don't look out, | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| c01363c | I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 3aed24e | The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time ther.. | decorative-arts material-culture social-history victorian | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 48e1bae | I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7579055 | In schools the rather stupid boys who work always do better than the clever boy who's idle, but when the clever boy works - why then, he does what you've done this term. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 08caa0c | With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 666d4fd | Hay cierta elegancia en malgastar el tiempo -repuso Ashenden-. Cualquier cretino es capaz de despilfarrar dinero, pero cuando uno gasta su propio tiempo tiene el placer de tirar una cosa que no tiene precio. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 436beb6 | The public are a lot of jackasses. If you yell and scream and throw yourself about you'll always get a lot of damned fools to shout themselves silly. Just barnstorming, that's what you've been doing the last four nights. It was false from beginning to end." "False? But I felt every word of it." "I don't care what you felt, you weren't acting it. Your performance was a mess. You were exaggerating; you were over-acting; you didn't carry convi.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 594202f | Now listen. If I think he's awful we'll just talk about the weather and the crops for a few minutes and then we'll have an ominous pause and stare at him. That always makes a man feel a perfect fool and the moment a man feels a fool he gets up and goes. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0d15c7f | His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 52da3ac | Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2212534 | Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2cb8915 | He was so pleasant that his fellow writers, his rivals and contemporaries, forgave him even the fact that he was a gentleman. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| c368c69 | But their fondest thoughts went to the two sons who had brought honour and glory to their ancient name. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| f29f4b5 | The great have no friends, dear Blasco. It is the price they must pay for their greatness. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 013c037 | Dona Beatriz was too proud to lie. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 27b49b0 | No one ever died of love yet," said the prioress with a savage bitterness." | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 94c4fa8 | She had in point of fact by now made up her mind to accept it, but she well knew that men like to think they decide matters for themselves. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e5486ec | She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0a65df1 | We're all so dreadfully tired of being goddesses. For centuries foolish men have set us up on a pedestal and vowed they were unworthy to touch the hem of our garments. And it is so dull. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| a570fbd | A virtue that only causes havoc and unhappiness is worth nothing. You can call it virtue if you like. I call it cowardice. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ff838b3 | Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. Cleopatra dissolved in wine a priceless pearl, but she gave it to Anthony to drink; when you waste the brief golden hours you take the beaker in which the gem is melted and dash its contents to the ground. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e28bbbe | It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realise that he was the creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshippers. | discomfort penitence religion repression | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 3e0f772 | Men have always formed gods in their own image. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| bba57c8 | I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination. I don't suppose you know what he is doing here, because I don't think he's very expansive with you. If any man singlehanded can put a stop to this frightful epidemic he's going to do it. He's doctoring the sick, cleaning the city up, trying to get the drinking water pure. He doesn't mind where he goes nor what he does. He's risking his life .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7c7e032 | Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere [...] Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 214250f | But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could and used foul language; we had one or two had hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to pri.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0a40208 | There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things. | W. Somerset Maugham |