as loud as my heart

I like a strong, intimate, manly fellowship, the kind of friendship which rejoices in sharp vigorous exchanges just as love rejoices in bites and scratches which draw blood. It is not strong enough nor magnanimous enough if it is not argumentative, if all is politeness and art; if it is afraid of clashes and walks hobbled. Neque enim disputari sine reprehensione potest. [It is impossible to debate without refuting.]

Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship, p. 34

1 week ago

I move towards the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me… I take such great pleasure in being judged and known that it is virtually indifferent to me which of the two forms it takes. My thought so often contradicts and condemns itself that it is all one to me if someone else does so, seeing that I give to hsi refutation only such authority as I please.

Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship, p. 34-5

1 week ago

The act of publishing and indicting my imperfections may teach someone how to fear them. (The talents which I most esteem in myself derive more honour from indicting me than praising me.) That is why I so often return to it and linger over it. Yet, when all has been said, you never talk about yourself without loss: condemn yourself and you are always believed: praise yourself and you never are.

Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship, p. 30-1

1 week ago

My horror of cruelty thrusts me deeper into clemency than any example of clemency ever could draw on me… Every day I am warned and counselled by the stupid deportment of someone. What hits you affects you and wakes you up more than what pleases you.

Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship, p. 31

1 week ago

It is a custom of our justice to punish some as a warning to others. For to punish them for having done wrong would, as Plato says, be stupid: what is done cannot be undone. The intention is to stop them from repeating the same mistake or to make others avoid their error. We do not improve the man we hang: we improve others by him.

Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship, p. 30

1 week ago

As an example of an ostensible conceptual fiction, consider that well-known entity, the average man. We have all heard of him, but could we meet him, pat his one and two-thirds children on the head and so on?

Space-like Time, F. M. Christensen, p. 28

1 month ago

If you have had a beautiful mother, people expect beauty from you and when they turn away puzzled you feel as if your heart would burst.

Elizabeth Taylor, Palladian

5 months ago -

1

We invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day: the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses; and the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues that impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inaccuracies in the tale of the loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues that impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away…

http://m.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/24/christmas-atheists?cat=lifeandstyle&type=article

5 months ago -

1

After all, how have Russian boys run the show up till now - a certain kind of boy, that is? Take this fetid inn, for example, this is where they gather, huddled in corners. They have never seen each other in their lives before, and when they get out of the inn they’ll never see each other again for forty years, well, but what of it, what are they going to talk about now that they’ve snatched a minute or two in this inn of theirs? About the questions of the universe, what else? Is there a God, is there such a thing as immortality? And as for those who don’t believe in God, well, they begin to talk of socialism and anarchism, of the reorganisation of the whole of mankind according to a new regime, so that in the end it’s the same old devil that pokes his head out, the same old questions, only seen from the other end. And what we see these days in our country is a large, large number of the most uniquely talented Russian boys doing nothing but talk of the eternal questions. Don’t you think so?

Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, Book V: The Brothers Become Acquainted (The Brothers Karamazov)

5 months ago -

5

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Virginia Woolf

6 months ago