If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.
Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences.
Whether a revolution succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.
It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.
No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
My thought has been shaped by books; my desires by pictures.
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.
A chronicle is very different from history proper.
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
When I write something, every word of it is meant. I can't say it enough.
We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.