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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3df1b09 | The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 05a94ad | worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 1487691 | fully half a century since the first signs of madness had been noticed, back at the Florida army fort. And yet still the symptoms remained the same--persistent, uncured, incurable. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 3640ab6 | Discounting every punctuation mark and every space--which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter--there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers. | Simon Winchester | ||
| c587e90 | after all the years of waiting, the interested world could at least see the magnificent complexity of the undertaking, the detail, the filigree work, the sheer intricacies of exactitude that the editors were bent on compiling. | Simon Winchester | ||
| dfa277b | The explosion itself was terrific, a monstrous thing that still attracts an endless procession of superlatives. It was the greatest detonation, the loudest sound, the most devastating volcanic event in modern recorded human history, and it killed more than thirty-six thousand people. | Simon Winchester | ||
| b53f675 | The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest applause. | Applause | ||
| 2ce8d1e | The applause of a single human being is of great consequence. | Applause | ||
| 838a409 | Now, seen from a palm plantation high on a green hillside, Krakatoa looks peaceful and serene, with just a thin column of white or gray or on occasion black smoke easing up from its summit. But looks are deceptive: All the while the child-mountain is growing steadily and rapidly, as the elemental fires that created the world rage deep inside. | Simon Winchester | ||
| c11e600 | Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the panicked inhabitants--and was promptly caught up in a massive eruption. He died of asphyxiation by volcanic gases on August 24, leaving behind him a vast reputation and, as memorial, a single word in the lexicon of modern vulcanology, Plinian. A Pl.. | Simon Winchester | ||
| 51d4be3 | During 1978 World Chess Championships, Karpov hired a psychologist to hypnotize Korchnoi. | ai hospitality hotelmarketing hotelstrategy learnworkcreate marketing metasearch revenuemanagement traveltech | Simone Puorto | |
| cbbffd1 | After the Age of Pericles, as Athenian confidence dimmed, that famous confidence was all too often replaced by cynicism, modesty by cockiness, sincerity by manipulation, strength by bluster. Though the gods were more and more loudly invoked, the prayers rang hollow, the appeal to conscience turned mute, and any reference to social justice tended to be met with a knowing smirk. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 3c911a7 | Anybody's applause is better than nobody's. | Applause | ||
| 97d7603 | This is God's self-description, the one he would have us remember. He is the God of mercy and forgiveness, the God who never deserts his people, faithful to the end, patient with all our failings however dismaying, but reminding us that a household--a familial environment, holding three (or sometimes four) generations--cannot escape the sins of the oldest generation; they necessarily infect the atmosphere. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 649eecb | The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture's stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 26ae5fc | If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero's speeches are language as practical tool. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 2035e07 | There are no mental health services offered to Death Row inmates. For whatever healing is done they themselves must be the healers. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 4a4befc | Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| c876c93 | The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men--senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds--performing meaningless duties. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 0c35b5b | Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature. | irish-history | Thomas Cahill | |
| c97289b | Translating Plato's philosophy to the context of Christian belief, Augustine finds that "out of a certain compassion for the masses God Most High bent down and subjected the authority of the divine intellect even to the human body itself"--in the incarnation of Jesus, the God-Man--so that God might recall "to the intelligible world souls blinded by the darkness of error and befouled by the slime of the body." | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 6e79372 | As we shall see, these depictions of divine wrath will eventually give way to a purer understanding of God, but at this moment we have a snapshot of monotheism in its tadpole stage. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| ab37f27 | It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God's own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God--the Real God, the One God--was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of their hearing him, it could happen o.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 192e0e6 | In the words of Arnaldo Momigliano, the most learned and nimble interpreter of antiquity in our age: "All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization combining central government and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced metal technology and the practice of international diplomacy. In all these civilizations there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual movements. Everywhere .. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| fe6a065 | Alexander was, therefore, "the Great," the greatest man who had ever lived. If Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of man himself. We may think such a value system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napolean enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and kommandants of th.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 1b20344 | There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men t.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| ef690f7 | To Yahweh" God is the spray on your lip from the freshly-poured ginger ale. No, God is the arrival on your lip of the spray. The arcing. The spree. God is definitely not that weird sexuality of wild bird rehabilitators. God is, instead, waves blown back hard from the shore. At night. Perhaps he is the rumbling scaring done by the haunted freight train, the shrill ghouls in the back cars climbing over each other to escape. God is weequashing.. | Tina Kelley | ||
| 1ddff24 | In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a d.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| ccc1e9a | In the words of Paul Johnson: The Temple, now, in Herod's1 version, rising triumphantly over Jerusalem, was an ocular reminder that Judaism was about Jews and their history--not about anyone else. Other gods flew across the deserts from the East without much difficulty, jettisoning the inconvenient and embarrassing accretions from their past, changing, as it were, their accents and manners as well as their names. But the God of the Jews was.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 1d33976 | Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good Samaritan, whose actions are Christ-like. Only if we put Christ before all practical considerations--only if we clear a place for him in our hearts (rather than clear the table)--will we be able to behave as the Samaritan does. For us who (like.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 3eeda2b | Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the Word did make it That I believe, and take it. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| a619d19 | So if it appears that my argument supports the necessity of lawyers, please accept that I say it with reluctant awareness that things would be worse without them. | David Brin | ||
| 61adf23 | Next panel [Plate 9]: Adam and Eve--painted by Masaccio--as they are thrown out of Eden. (Masaccio seems to have been, too.) The figures are less standard, even less accurate, than Masolino's: Adam's arms are far too short, his right calf is impossibly bowlegged; Eve's arms are of unequal length and she is dumpier than in Masolino's version, with a fat back and hefty haunches and an awfully thick right ankle. But they are alive, believable,.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 031167c | By the mid-seventeenth century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought. | invisible seventeenth-century thought visible | Thomas Cahill | |
| 2aaab14 | The real purpose of religion--at the popular level--was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let's all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same steps, and wander through the same colonnades. Let the Jews have their god, by all means--who's stopping them?--and let us all have ours. And no provincial exclusiveness, please. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 762e490 | Like Cato, give his little senate laws,And sit attentive to his own applause. | Applause | ||
| 6f8a1fa | To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters--which were not all that important, anyway--was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 5361c46 | That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who "make a desolation and call it peace") at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn't Philip of Macedon's first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn't Alexander's last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative A.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 759cb07 | The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the "cheap grace" of the majority of German Christians in favor of the "costly grace" that linked Christian belief to social courage." | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 7da961a | In its manuals for priestly confessors, the church enumerates the sins we must all confess, listing these in order of seriousness from the least (venial) to the most serious (mortal), to those so grave as to entail formal excommunication from the Communion of Saints and, therefore, requiring special dispensation, such as a writ of forgiveness issued by a bishop or pope. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 88cfb41 | It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that He speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that He gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives th.. | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 270c0d5 | For the great Gaels of Ireland," wrote G. K. Chesterton, Are the men that God made mad. For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad." | Thomas Cahill | ||
| e7bfc1e | Cujus regio, ejus religio (Whose region it is, his is the religion). | Thomas Cahill | ||
| 8b44c7d | Form one essential vision when you start your drawing that will be evident upon completion | Juliette Aristides |