Critics

"If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author."

"Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color."

"Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible."

"That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox."

"It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing."

"Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."

"The vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud."

"Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius."

"Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor."

"The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it."

"Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page."

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings."

"From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite). Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."

"There is no combination of characters one can make — dhcmrlchtdj, for example — that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god."

"I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand."

"Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno."

"El original es infiel a la traducción."

"I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards. . . I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world."

"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy."

"In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.<!--"

"There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal."

"There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once."

"No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist."

"Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is."

"Besides, time, which despoils castles, enriches verses . . . Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men."

"There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one."

"The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth."

"His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb."

"I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. [...] The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources."

"It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like."

"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."

"Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art."

"Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises."

"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."

"The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy."

"Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety."

"Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world."

"Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro."

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."

"He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola."

"My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges."

"Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different."

"The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well."

"We all think that fate has dealt us a wretched sort of lot in life, and that others must be better. [...] I presume that in the heaven of the Blessèd there are those who believe that the advantages of that locale are much exaggerated by theologists, who have never been there themselves."

"When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it."

"Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."

"El hecho ocurrió en el mes de febrero de 1969, al norte de Boston, en Cambridge. No lo escribí inmediatamente porque mi primer propósito fue olvidarlo, para no perder la razón."

"I do believe that my country is now joyfully emerging from the swamp. I believe that we deserve to leave the swamp we have been in. And we are leaving it thanks to the work of the Sword. Here, you have already emerged from the swamp. And so Chile, this region, this country, is both a long country and an honorable Sword."

"Ser conservador es una forma de ser escéptico."

"Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song."

"Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown."

"The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book."

"The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?"

"There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it."

"La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia."

"As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves — and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity — are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans."

"No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados..."

"He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer. No he sido feliz."

"The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things."

"The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"Life itself is a quotation."

"¿De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad."

"Time carries him as the river carries A leaf in the downstream water. No matter. The enchanted one insists And shapes God with delicate geometry. Since his illness, since his birth, He goes on constructing God with the word. The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved."

"Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it."

"En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí."

"I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive."

"I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen — all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals. Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."

"El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto."

"Censorship is the mother of metaphor."

"Life and death have been lacking in my life."

"Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life."

"The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time."

"Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic."

"It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his "nocturnes" answered: "All of my life." With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events."

"We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false."

"Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito."

"He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality."

"It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them — at least in an infinitesimal way — does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others."

"The central problem of novel-writing is causality."

"The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo."

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia."

"One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man."

"Para uno de esos gnosticos, el visible universo era una ilusion o (mas precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan."

"In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen."

"Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it."

"Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial."

"One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself."

"The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first."

"It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time."

"The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase "all aspects" is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments."

"One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men."

"Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."

"I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty."

"It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death."

"I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . ."

"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."

"I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars."

"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."

"A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time."

"Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing."

"I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths."

"In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend."

"Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die."

"In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?"

"The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us."

"Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."

"My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out."

"There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy."

"Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension."

"Thinking, meditating, imagining are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be."

"The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that, sooner or later, all men will do and know all things."

"That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable...."

"What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it."

"It's possible, but not interesting," Lonnrot answered. "You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber."

""Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions," murmmured Lönnrot. "Like Christianity," the editor put in."

"The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables."

"Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned."

"The time for your labor has been granted."

"Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I'm looking for God, Hladik replied. God, the librarian said, is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents' parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it."

"In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing."

"On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up, diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity."

"If Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt. Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain."

"And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges."

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."

"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon."

"Universal history is the history of a few metaphors."

"In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them."

""Wakefield" prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of "Wakefield." The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them."

"In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."

"A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read."

"The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps."

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."

"In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects."

"Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James."

"These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance."

"It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is."

"Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios."

"The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns."

"On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends: "In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin." Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of governments (especially in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity."

"I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, although his book recorded it."

"There is a flavor that our time (perhaps surfeited by the clumsy imitations of professional patriots) does not usually perceive without some suspicion: the fundamental flavor of the heroic."

"Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply. It is as if a Carthaginian had bequeathed to us the memory of the exploit of Regulus. Saxo Grammaticus wrote with justification in his Gesta Danorum: "The men of Thule [Iceland] are very fond of learning and of recording the history of all peoples and they are equally pleased to reveal the excellences of others or of themselves." Not the day when the Saxon said the words, but the day when an enemy perpetuated them, was the historic date. A date that is a prophecy of something still in the future: the day when races and nations will be cast into oblivion, and the solidarity of all mankind will be established."

"Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end."

"Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library."

"The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing."

"Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara."

"I suppose he had the good luck to be executed, no? I had an hour's chat with him in Buenos Aires. He struck me as a kind of play actor, no? Living up to a certain role. I mean, being a professional Andalusian... But in the case of Lorca, it was very strange because I lived in Andalusia and the Andalusians aren't a bit like that. His were stage Andalusians. Maybe he thought that in Buenos Aires he had to live up to that character, but in Andalusia, people are not like that. In fact, if you are in Andalusia, if you are talking to a man of letters and you speak to him about bullfights, he'll say, 'Oh well, that sort of this pleases people, I suppose, but really the torero works in no danger whatsoever. Because they are bored by these things, because every writer is bored by the local color in his own country. Well, when I met Lorca, he was being a professional Andalusian... Besides, Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very troubled about a very important figure in the contemporary world. A character in whom he could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who was this character and it turned out this character was Mickey Mouse. I suppose he was trying to be clever. And I thought, 'That's the kind of thing you say when you are very, very young and you want to astonish somebody.' But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way. But when he started in about Mickey Mouse being a symbol of America, there was a friend of mine there and he looked at me and I looked at him and we both walked away because we were too old for that kind of game, no? Even at that time."

"Well, [Lorca had] a gift for gab. For example, he makes striking metaphors, but I think he makes striking metaphors for him, because I think that his world was mostly verbal. I think that he was fond of playing words against each other, the contrast of words, but I wonder if he knew what he was doing."

"Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a law suit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn't mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, I was an Argentine, poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us."

"This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather."

"Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could — a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one."

"I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets."

"Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself."

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic...For Borges, on the other hand, the key to the fantastic resides within the articulation of a new language. His allegories, fictions, poems and essays make a distinction between what language represents and what it wants to represent. Within the border of that which is spoken and that which is not, arises the space that we would call the fantastic, where the unusual does and does not astonish and where magic is also reality."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."

"Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges is no longer my favorite short story book. I could name dozens I love more and held more dear—but when I read it, at age 12 I think, maybe younger, it blew my mind in a way that taught me that fiction was a territory of freedom unlike any other, where if I’d venture, I’d have immense powers. The possibilities that these stories offer, the sheer power of the imagination displayed here, is unforgettable. And for me to read it in Spanish, to read this kind of wizardry in my language, was just a joy."

"Borges is the only living successor to Franz Kafka."

"As Borges, the Master, said: “When I heard Funes speak, then I had the story.” One has to let the character speak."

"Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges' thought. In "Pascal's Sphere" he examines an image which is not only paradoxical in itself — the universe as an infinite sphere, in other words, a boundless form perfectly circumscribed — but which has also served to express diametrically opposite emotions: Bruno's elation and Pascal's anguish. But the other basic symmetry to note here is Borges' history of the metaphor. Not only paradoxes are found throughout this collection, but also various listings of ideas or themes or images which though diverse in origin and detail are essentially the same. In "The Flower of Coleridge" the coincidence of Valéry's, Emerson's, and Shelley's conceptions of all literature as the product of one Author seems itself to bear out that conception. At the beginning of the essay on Hawthorne, Borges again briefly traces the history of a metaphor — the likening of our dreams to a theatrical performance — and adds that true metaphors cannot be invented, since they have always existed. Such "avatars" point beyond the flux and diversity of history to a realm of eternal archetypes, which, though limited in number, "can be all things for all people, like the Apostle." While the paradox upsets our common notions of reality and suggests that irreducible elements are actually one, recurrence negates history and the separateness of individuals. Of course, this too is a paradox, as "New Refutation of Time" shows: time must exist in order to provide the successive identities with which it is to be "refuted." The two symmetries noted above, if we pursue their implications far enough, finally coalesce, with something of the same dizzying sense, so frequent in Borges' stories, of infinite permutations lurking at every turn. Both are uses of what he calls a pantheist extension of the principle of identity — God is all things: a suitably heterogeneous selection of these may allude to Totality — which has, as he notes in the essay on Whitman, unlimited rhetorical possibilities."

"Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of international goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for Jorge Luis Borges, who was the obvious international candidate for the Nobel. They would not consider him. They didn't like his politics."

"Borges is very accessible to English people. English was his first language, did you know that? His grandmother taught him English before he learnt Spanish, and there is something about his writing that comes over in the English."

"When I met Borges some time ago and remarked that I was about to embark on writing a book about Schopenhauer, he became excited and started talked volubly about how much Schopenhauer had meant to him. It was the desire to read Schopenhauer in the original, he said, that had made him learn German; and when people asked him, which they often had, why he with his love of intricate structure had never attempted a systematic exposition of the world-view which underlay his writings, his reply was that he did not do it because it had already been done by Schopenhauer."

"O inventor da literatura virtual, essa sua literatura que parece ter-se desprendido da realidade para melhor revelar os seus invisíveis mistérios."

"(About Pope Francis) remains an enigma of gifts that time and history will reveal. There is still a wealth of qualities that we will discover over time. Pope Francis had a vast theological, literary and philosophical culture. He always presented himself with simplicity, never flaunting his culture, but he was a fine intellectual. Suffice it to say that he was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges, whom he invited to speak at his school in Buenos Aires."

"(What’s your go-to classic? And your favorite book no one else has heard of?) More than any other book, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Labyrinths,” which I discovered when I was 15, showed me what was possible in short prose nonfiction."

"Borges was already considered a sort of genius but “a writer for writers,” nobody else would be able to understand his stories. Or buy his books, for that matter. Much later things changed dramatically, and now his oeuvre is a worldwide reference. One could write forever about this phenomenon. And many many books have been written: Borges and mathematics, Borges and the Kabbala, and so on."

"Borges was very shy and ironic and somewhat self-absorbed. His colleagues admired his writing, of course, but said he was a writer for writers, that the common reader would never understand him."

"He was a walking system of thought. You could see the way his mind worked, since he was offering it so generously-also in a self-centered way, because he didn't care to listen much. He monologued in the most splendid and humorous fashion-he seemed so serious, but was full of wit and naughty humor...The people who surrounded him-the group that visited our home during those years were all great. Borges didn't stand out among the rest; he was so shy. What I do remember are his lectures. I went to every one of them. At times, there would be sudden and long silences; the public suffered, thinking he had lost the thread, but he was simply searching. The minute he opened his mouth again, the exact term emerged like a gem."

"For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?"

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

"People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive."

"Mahomet established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ, by commanding his followers to lay down their own lives."

"FEU. Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et savants. Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix."

"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?—Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis. It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want. How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me."

"In order to enter into a real knowledge of your condition, consider it in this image: A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find their king, who was lost; and having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people."

"Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition."

"Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king."

"If it had pleased them [the legislators] to order that this wealth, after having been possessed by fathers during their life, should return to the republic after their death, you would have no reason to complain of it."

"The whole title by which you possess your property, is not a title of nature but of a human institution."

"This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another."

"If you act externally with men in conformity with your rank, you should recognize, by a more secret but truer thought, that you have nothing naturally superior to them."

"If the public thought elevates you above the generality of men, let the other humble you, and hold you in a perfect equality with all mankind, for this is your natural condition."

"Do not mistake yourself by believing that your being has something in it more exalted than that of others."

"What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly. But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?"

"All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you."

"If, being duke and peer, you would not be contented with my standing uncovered before you, but should also wish that I should esteem you, I should ask you to show me the qualities that merit my esteem. If you did this, you would gain it, and I could not refuse it to you with justice; but if you did not do it, you would be unjust to demand it of me; and assuredly you would not succeed, were you the greatest prince in the world."

"What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal."

"God is surrounded with people full of love who demand of him the benefits of love which are in his power: thus he is properly the king of love."

"You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet."

"It is not your strength and your natural power that subjects all these people to you. Do not pretend then to rule them by force or to treat them with harshness. Satisfy their reasonable desires; alleviate their necessities; let your pleasure consist in being beneficent; advance them as much as you can, and you will act like the true king of desire."

"There are some men who expose themselves to damnation so foolishly by avarice, by brutality, by debauches, by violence, by excesses, by blasphemies! ...it is always a great folly for a man to expose himself to damnation... He must despise desire and its kingdom, and aspire to that kingdom of love in which all the subjects breathe nothing but love, and desire nothing but the benefits of love."

"In reading this author [ Montaigne ] and comparing him with Epictetus, I have found that they are assuredly the two greatest defenders of the two most celebrated sects of the world, and the only ones conformable to reason, since we can only follow one of these two roads, namely: either that there is a God, and then we place in him the sovereign good; or that he is uncertain, and that then the true good is also uncertain, since he is incapable of it."

"If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works, in which we see some traces of him because they are his images, how much more just is it to consider in the productions of minds the efforts which they make to imitate the essential truth, even in shunning it, and to remark wherein they attain it and wherein they wander from it, as I have endeavored to do in this study."

"The source of the errors of these two sects, is in not having known that the state of man at the present time differs from that of his creation; so that the one, remarking some traces of his first greatness and being ignorant of his corruption, has treated nature as sound and without need of redemption, which leads him to the height of pride; whilst the other, feeling the present wretchedness and being ignorant of the original dignity, treats nature as necessarily infirm and irreparable, which precipitates it into despair of arriving at real good, and thence into extreme laxity."

"These two states which it is necessary to know together in order to see the whole truth, being known separately, lead necessarily to one of these two vices, pride or indolence, in which all men are invariably led before grace, since if they do not remain in their disorders through laxity, they forsake them through vanity, so true is that which you have just repeated to me from St. Augustine, and which I find to a great extent; for in fact homage is rendered to them in many ways."

"One, knowing the duties of man and being ignorant of his impotence, is lost in presumption, and that the other, knowing the impotence and being ignorant of the duty, falls into laxity; whence it seems that since the one leads to truth, the other to error, there would be formed from their alliance a perfect system of morals. But instead of this peace, nothing but war and a general ruin would result from their union; for the one establishing certainty, the other doubt, the one the greatness of man, the other his weakness, they would destroy the truths as well as the falsehoods of each other. So that they cannot subsist alone because of their defects, nor unite because of their opposition, and thus they break and destroy each other to give place to the truth of the Gospel. This it is that harmonizes the contrarieties by a wholly divine act, and uniting all that is true and expelling all that is false, thus makes of them a truly celestial wisdom in which those opposites accord that were incompatible in human doctrines."

"These philosophers of the world place contrarieties in the same subject; for the one attributed greatness to nature and the other weakness to this same nature, which could not subsist; whilst faith teaches us to place them in different subjects: all that is infirm belonging to nature, all that is powerful belonging to grace. Such is the marvelous and novel union which God alone could teach, and which he alone could make, and which is only a type and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the single person of a Man-God."

"C'est une maladie naturelle à l'homme de croire qu'il possède la vérité directement…"

"No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will."

"All men are almost led to believe not of proof, but by attraction. This way is base, ignoble, and irrelevant; every one therefore disavows it. Each one professes to believe and even to love nothing but what he knows to be worthy of belief and love."

"I do not speak here of divine truths... because they are infinitely superior to nature: God alone can place them in the soul... I know that he has desired that they should enter from the heart into the mind, and not from the mind into the heart, to humiliate that proud power of reasoning that pretends to the right to be the judge of the things that the will chooses; and to cure this infirm will which is wholly corrupted by its filthy attachments."

"Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity."

"They [men] have corrupted this [God's supernatural] order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us."

"God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it."

"Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason."

"Several particular maxims... are as powerful, although false, in carrying away belief, as those the most true."

"As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy."

"A doubtful balance is made between truth and pleasure, and... the knowledge of one and the feeling of the other stir up a combat the success of which is very uncertain, since, in order to judge of it, it would be necessary to know all that passes in the innermost spirit of the man, of which man himself is scarcely ever conscious."

"It is necessary to have regard to the person whom we wish to persuade, of whom we must know the mind and the heart, what principles he acknowledges, what things he loves; and then observe in the thing in question what affinity it has with the acknowledged principles, or with the objects so delightful by the pleasure which they give him."

"The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!"

"The principles of pleasure are not firm and stable. They are different in all mankind, and variable in every particular with such a diversity that there is no man more different from another than from himself at different times."

"There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices."

"This art, which I call the art of persuading, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined."

"If we do not secure the foundation, we cannot secure the edifice."

"A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading."

"Rules for Definitions. I. Not to undertake to define any of the things so well known of themselves that the clearer terms cannot be had to explain them. II. Not to leave any terms that are at all obscure or ambiguous without definition. III. Not to employ in the definition of terms any words but such as are perfectly known or already explained."

"Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves."

"Rules for Demonstrations. I. Not to undertake to demonstrate any thing that is so evident of itself that nothing can be given that is clearer to prove it. II. To prove all propositions at all obscure, and to employ in their proof only very evident maxims or propositions already admitted or demonstrated. III. To always mentally substitute definitions in the place of things defined, in order not to be misled by the ambiguity of terms which have been restricted by definitions."

"These eight rules [above] contain all the precepts for solid and immutable proofs."

"Five [of the above] rules are of absolute necessity, and cannot be dispensed with without essential defect and often without error."

"Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained."

"Rules necessary for axioms. Not to demand in axioms any but things perfectly evident."

"Rules necessary for demonstrations. To prove all propositions, and to employ nothing for their proof but axioms fully evident of themselves, or propositions already demonstrated or admitted; Never to take advantage of the ambiguity of terms by failing mentally to substitute definitions that restrict or explain them."

"These five rules [above] form all that is necessary to render proofs convincing, immutable, and to say all, geometrical; and the eight rules together render them even more perfect."

"It is necessary to show that there is nothing so little known [as the above rules], nothing more difficult to practice, or nothing more useful and universal."

"As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it."

"If they have entered into the spirit if these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works."

"All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. ...let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds... it will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous."

"I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before. ...I am far from affirming that Descartes is not the real author of it, even if he may have learned it only in reading this distinguished saint; for I know how much difference there is between writing a word by chance without making a longer and more extended reflection on it, and perceiving in this word an admirable series of conclusions, which prove the distinction between material and spiritual natures, and making of it a firm and sustained principle of a complete metaphysical system, as Descartes has pretended to do. ...it is on this supposition that I say that this expression is as different in his writings from the saying in others who have said it by chance, as in a man full of life and strength, from a corpse."

"One man will say a thing of himself without comprehending its excellence, in which another will discern a marvelous series of conclusions, which makes us affirm that it is no longer the same expression, and that he is no more indebted for it to the one from whom he has learned it, than a beautiful tree belongs to the one who cast the seed, without thinking of it, or knowing it, into the fruitful soil which caused its growth by its own fertility."

"Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason."

"The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations."

"Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind."

"It is not among extraordinary and fantastic things that excellence is to be found, of whatever kind it may be. We rise to attain it and become removed from it: it is oftenest necessary to stoop for it."

"The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written."

"Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common."

"I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural."

"The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment."

"One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow, is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions."

"During the years that followed the writing of the and lesser religious works Pascal began to devote his life to the advancement of Christianity. At the the heart of this activity were the Thoughts, which, begun around September 1656, date mainly from 1657 and 1658. ... This is a largely unfinished work, and (in the view of many commentators) is the most ambitious of all attempts to convert the agnostic and the atheist to religious belief."

"I was very fortunate. I was curious and handicapped as a young person. And so I read everything I could get my hands on and I have a good memory. And I have a lot of energy. It's a blessing. So I continued to learn. I'm hungry for knowledge still. Not every young person is blessed or visited with that combination. So he or she desperately needs to go to a university and be introduced to some of the great ideas of humankind. One needs to worry over the question of "Why am I here, what am I doing here of all things in this place, this life?" One needs to know Aristotle and Plato. One needs it desperately. One must have Leopold and Pascal. Must! I mean desperately, if one is to be at ease anywhere. One should have read the African folk tale to see what the West African calls deep thinking. One must worry over ideas that if I come forward how far do we have to go before we meet? And when we meet will I go through you and you go through me and continue until we meet someone else? This is an African concept. Do we stay once we meet or do I actually go right through you and pass through you and continue on that road. Is that what life is? All this knowledge is available at universities and one is more likely to run into a great teacher at a university than one is at a pool hall. It just follows."

"It is significant that we owe the first explicit formulation of the principle of recurrence to the genius of Blaise Pascal... Pascal stated the principle in a tract called The Arithmetic Triangle which appeared in 1654. Yet... the gist of the tract was contained in the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat regarding a problem in gambling, the same correspondence which is now regarded as the nucleus from which developed the theory of probabilities. It surely is a fitting subject for mystic contemplation that the principle of reasoning by recurrence, which is so basic in pure mathematics, and the theory of probabilities, which is the basis of all deductive sciences, were both conceived while devising a scheme for the division of stakes in an unfinished match of two gamblers."

"What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: It must be "contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.""

"Man infinitely surpasses man."

"Pascal scornfully said that simple workmen had been able to convince of error those great men that are called 'philosophers'. It was, then, these unlearned men... who were most ready to believe 'what they saw with their eyes and touched with their hands'."

"To philosophize is always to rehabilitate the essential importance of the human dimension, and hence the dignity of man. This was the meaning of the Socratic quest, and also the meaning of Pascal's anguish at the threshold of the Cartesian revolution in science. In this respect, Pascal is an even more significant figure of philosophy than Socrates: his was the first brutal reaction to the claim of science to remove man from his position as a privileged being in creation; nobody has so far been able to improve upon his demonstration why science is unsatisfactory to give man meaning and to fill his heart with joy."

"Pascal was no obscurantist, but he measured how far science (esprit de géometrie) may go and become irrelevant to the problems of human destiny. The achievements of science are not denied by this stand, nor are they dismissed as the ostrich with its head burrowed in sand dismisses reality. What is asserted is that our original endowments as they reflect on the data of experience, are, with all their limitations and imperfections, the only necessary and indispensable means by which we confront existence, the only weapon commensurate with our struggle."

"Pascal is a judicious critic of Descartes, not opposing him at all points, but opposing him nevertheless, on points that are fundamental. He perceived, first, that the Cartesian desire for certain knowledge was based upon a false criterion of certainty. Descartes must begin with something so sure that it cannot be doubted, and was led, as a consequence, to believe that all genuine knowledge is technical knowledge. Pascal avoided this conclusion by his doctrine of probability: the only knowledge that is certain is certain on account of its partiality; the paradox that probable knowledge has more of the whole truth than certain knowledge. Secondly, Pascal perceived that the Cartesian raisonnement is never in fact the whole source of the knowledge involved in any concrete activity. The human mind, he asserts, is not wholly dependent for its successful working upon a conscious and formulated technique; and even where a technique is involved, the mind observes the technique 'tacitement, naturellement et sans art' . The precise formulation of rules of inquiry endangers the success of the inquiry by exaggerating the importance of method. Pascal was followed by others, and indeed much of the history of modern philosophy revolves round this question. But, though later writers were often more elaborate in their criticism, few detected more surely than Pascal that the significance of Rationalism is not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its failure to recognize any other: its philosophical error lies in the certainty it attributes to technique and in its doctrine of the sovereignty of technique; its practical error lies in its belief that nothing but benefit can come from making conduct self-conscious."

"An attempt has been made to prove, by means of selected passages from Pascal's Pensées, an apology for Christianity which he left in draft form, that by sacrificing reason to faith he denied the possibility of all philosophy. I propose to show, not as others seem to have done successfully, that Pascal was not a sceptic, but that in his “'Pensées”' there are, if not a system comparable in scope and detail to those of Descartes, of a Spinoza, a Malebranche or a Leibniz, at least the ideas that constitute the principles of a true philosophy. I propose to show equally that these ideas are in perfect agreement with Pascal's beliefs, and that there is no reason to be surprised by them, because there are none more suitable for harmonising, and even intimately uniting, Christianity and philosophy in their highest parts. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 131)"

"Pascal contrasts the objects of mathematics with other objects that are completely different, which he does not group under a common name, but merely enumerates and describes, although it is easy to recognise what he might have called, if he had had the language of his time, things of an aesthetic and moral nature; and at the same time he characterises with precise features the faculties of the mind to which these two kinds of objects respectively belong. No one else, in fact, had a clearer awareness of the difference between the two orders of things and faculties, whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit; no one else had such a correct and vivid sense of the special nature of the two orders, and knew their consequences so well. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 144)"

"Pascal is the only great mathematician whose standing is equally great among writers. Moreover, his devotion to the Jansenist ideal of serving the needy had one enduring practical consequence: his idea of a public transportation system. Shortly before his death... Pascal saw the inauguration of the world's first omnibus service. Coaches could be taken from the Porte Sainte-Antoine to the Luxembourg in Paris for 5 sous, with the profits being directed to the relief of the poor."

"To treat the living body as a mechanism was repugnant, and seemed even ludicrous, to Pascal."

"Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God."

"Pascal's Thoughts are not a book. We must bear this observation in mind, if we are to judge of them aright. They are not a book; perhaps they may be two, or even more. They are — if we must give them a name and define them — they are Pascal himself — whole Pascal, excepting in so far as he was a geometrician, properly so called, and a natural philosopher. The Thoughts are only the papers on which this great man threw out, from time to time, all that occupied his powerful mind, until the excess of physical malady reduced him to complete inaction, and put, so to speak, the seals upon his genius. Great pains have been taken, and not without success, to reduce these scattered materials, by means of art, into a kind of whole. Sometimes, perhaps, the secret of the writer has been guessed; possibly, in certain cases, his intention has been entirely misunderstood."

"Pascal proves nothing in favour of Religion, unless that a man of genius may be foolish on some subjects, and is but a child, when he is weak enough to listen to his prejudices."

"There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man..."

"La netteté d’esprit cause aussi la netteté de la passion; c’est pourquoi un esprit grand et net aime avec ardeur, et il voit distinctement ce qu’il aime."

"Knowledge is like a sphere, the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown."

"There is a great affinity in me with the Hindu genius - that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy and speculative, but destitute of ambition, personality and will. Pantheistic disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action - these are all present in my nature, in the nature at least which has been developed by years and circumstances. Still the West has also its part in me. What I have found difficult to keep up a prejudice in favor of my form, nationality or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my own person, my own usefulness, interest or opinions of the moment. What does it all matter? It is not perhaps not a bad thing,' he says, 'that in the midst of the devouring activities of the Western world there should be a few Brahmanical souls."

"Ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation — to force the esteem of others — seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. A struggle with unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, for all the while my heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have been systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely despair and the deepest discouragement have been my constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let everything slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart."

"[There still remains the question whether] he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, "devour his heart in secret;" whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers — those whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it — had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive."

"There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being."

"I can find no words for what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age."

"I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me — and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world. I am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, concentrated upon this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering distractions of life — after having drowned myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive existence, yet without ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion — I come again upon the fathomless abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern, where dwell 'Die Mütter,' where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, which has neither movement nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all else passes away."

"Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. — Amiel's journal; the Journal intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel 1890 (p.368)"

"There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven."

"Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven."

"To adore, to understand, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: there is my law my duty, my happiness, my heaven. Let come what come will — even death. Only be at peace with self, live in the presence of God, in communion with Him, and leave the guidance of existence to those universal powers against whom thou canst do nothing! If death gives me time, so much the better. If its summons is near, so much the better still; if a half-death overtake me, still so much the better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening before me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him."

"It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy."

"At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study."

"I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living."

"Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you."

"To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also — He above all — is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended."

"Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell — all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus, I think, said, "the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.""

"Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it. To our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have borne the marks of a hateful pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase "ye are gods," and so would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of "the race of God." Our century wants a new theology — that is to say, a more profound explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity."

"Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh — that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage."

"The relation of thought to action filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it: Action is but coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling actions, of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the condensation of a multitude of truths and thoughts, and that the wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more active, the deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious, intelligent and moral action."

"Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind."

"Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal."

"Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury conscious of its impotence. (30 December 1850)"

"To repel one's cross is to make it heavier."

"In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits."

"Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is not yet the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear and undivided voice, a voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light and serenity."

"My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to my own little rôle, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in the piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. It is a Doppelgängerei, quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality and the repugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean."

"Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority."

"We must learn to look upon life as an apprenticeship to progressive renunciation, a perpetual diminution in our pretensions, our hopes, our powers, and our liberty."

"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."

"Without passion, man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark."

"Liberty, equality — bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness."

"The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings."

"The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing."

"Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness; every authority rouses their ridicule, every superstition amuses them, every convention moves them to contradiction. Only force finds favor in their eyes, and they have no toleration for anything that is not purely natural and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not worth one man of talent, nor ten men of talent worth one man of genius. And in the individual, feeling is more than cleverness, reason is worth as much as feeling, and conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is not mockable, he may at least be neither loved, nor considered, nor esteemed. He may make himself feared, it is true, and force others to respect his independence; but this negative advantage, which is the result of a negative superiority, brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing."

"Action limits us; whereas in the state of contemplation we are endlessly expansive. Will localizes us; thought universalizes us. My soul wavers between half a dozen antagonistic general conceptions, because it is responsive to all the great instincts of human nature, and its aspiration is to the absolute, which is only to be reached through a succession of contraries. It has taken me a great deal of time to understand myself, and I frequently find myself beginning over again the study of the oft-solved problem, so difficult is it for us to maintain any fixed point within us. I love everything, and detest one thing only — the hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single arbitrary form, even were it chosen by myself. Liberty for the inner man is then the strongest of my passions — perhaps my only passion. Is such a passion lawful? It has been my habit to think so, but intermittently, by fits and starts. I am not perfectly sure of it."

"The will localizes us, thought universalizes us. My soul wavers between two, four, six general and contradictory conceptions, for it obeys all the great instincts of human nature, and aspires to the absolute, which can only be realized by a succession of contraries."

"Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!"

"My mind has been a tumult of opposing systems, — Stoicism, Quietism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a temptation, why return to it, after having judged and conquered it? Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. The individual is an eternal dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never leaves me, even in my moments of religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Mala; and I look at her, as it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child hidden — a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idyls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer."

"This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of inward ecstasy, — knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven."

"Society lives by faith, develops by reason."

"The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic or eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith,—that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind. The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery on the other hand is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship, the power of proselytism. When the "cross" became the "foolishness" of the cross, it took possession of the masses."

"If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and common crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty."

"Great god of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel."

"Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is — and that is the point I want to stress — that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word. . . I ask whether it is not possible to see in the present social conflict of the world an analogous struggle between two, three, five equally serious verities and equally generous idealisms? I think it is possible, and that is the most dramatic element in modern civilization, that a human truth is opposed to another human truth no less human, ideal against ideal, positive worth against worth no less positive, instead of the struggle being as we are so often told, one between noble truth and vile selfish error."

"Socialism is good when it comes to wages, but it tells me nothing when it comes to other questions in life that are more private and painful, for which I must seek answers elsewhere. Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees … Relativism is neither a method of fighting, nor a method of creating, for both of these are uncompromising and at times even ruthless; rather, it is a method of cognition. If one must fight or create, it is necessary that this be preceded by the broadest possible knowledge ... One of the worst muddles of this age is its confusing of the ideas behind combative and cognitive activity. Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for, so much that he will be called a relativist because of it."

"Look, justice has to be as unquestioned as the multiplication tables. I don’t know if you could prove that every theft is wrong; but I can prove to you that every theft is against the law, because I can arrest you every time. If you scattered pearls in the street, then a policeman could give you a ticket for littering. But if you started performing miracles, we couldn’t stop you, unless we called it a public nuisance or unlawful public assembly. There must be some kind of breach of order for us to intervene."

"Each of us is we."

"Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end ... Art must not serve might."

"I think I am slowly becoming an anarchist, that this is only another label for my privateness, and I think that you will understand this in the sense of being against collectivity."

"I don't say that it is a bad or useless profession: but it isn't one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort — you don't even see it. But I'd like all the things I used to see to be in it: the ringing hammer-strokes of the smith and the colors of the whisping of the stone-mason, the bustling of the baker, the humility of the poor, and all the lusty strength and skill which men of towering stature put into their work before the astonished and fascinated eyes of a child."

"I don’t know whether we have souls or not; but there are immortal things within us, and one of them is this instinctive desire for justice. I’m no better than anyone else, but there is something within me that isn’t only mine, that doesn’t belong only to me — the notion of a more exacting and more powerful order. I know I’m saying this badly, but at that moment I understood what crime is and what is meant by an offense against God. You see, a person who’s been murdered is like a holy place that’s been violated and defiled."

"Oh man, at that end not much has been left of your excellence, nothing of all that you have been boasting about through life - only sex, fear, self-admiration and a few other things you are usually ashamed of."

"My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul."

"Dear Miss Glory, we've already had at least a hundred saviors and prophets here. Every boat brings another one. Missionaries, anarchists, the Salvation Army, everything imaginable. It would amaze you to know how many churches and lunatics there are in the world."

"Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with — no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do."

"They learn to speak, write, and do arithmetic. They have a phenomenal memory. If one read them the Encyclopedia Britannica they could repeat everything back in order, but they never think up anything original. They'd make fine university professors."

"Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time."

"Within the next ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There'll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there'll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves... But before that some awful things may happen, Miss Glory. That just can't be avoided. But then the subjugation of man by man and the slavery of man to matter will cease. Never again will anyone pay for his bread with hatred and his life. There'll be no more laborers, no more secretaries. No one will have to mine coal or slave over someone else's machines. No longer will man need to destroy his soul doing work that he hates."

"O Adam, Adam! no longer will you have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow; you will return to Paradise where you were nourished by the hand of God. You will be free and supreme; you will have no other task, no other work, no other cares than to perfect your own being. You will be the master of creation."

"People should be a little loony, Helena. That's the best thing about them."

""Figh-ting in the Bal-kans." Lord Jesus, another of God's punishments! But that war'll get here too! Is it far from here?"

"It's always the same thing, one war after another —"

"Each factory will be making Robots of a diťferent color, a different nationality, a different tongue; that they'll all be different — as different from one another as fingerprints; that they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and ... we, we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory... Thunder, we'll make Black Robots and Swedish Robots and Italian Robots and Chinese Robots, and then let someone try to drive the notion of brotherhood into the noggin of their organization..."

"Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease."

"We made the Robots look too much alike. A hundred thousand identical faces all looking this way. A hundred thousand expressionless faces. It's a nightmare."

"Old Rossum thought only of his godless hocus-pocus and young Rossum of his billions. And that wasn't the dream of your R. U. R. shareholders either. They dreamed of the dividends. And on those dividends humanity will perish."

"I wanted man to become a master! So he wouldn't have to live from hand to mouth! I didn't want to see another soul grow numb slaving over someone else's machines! I wanted there to be nothing, nothing, nothing left of that damned social mess! I abhorred degradation and suffering! I was fighting against poverty! I wanted a new generation of mankind! ... I wanted to transform all of humanity into a world-wide aristocracy. Unrestricted, free, and supreme people. Something even greater than people."

"Thunder, there are so many beautiful things! The world was beautiful and we — we — Boys, boys, tell me, what did we ever take the time to enjoy?"

"Everything is done for! All of humanity! The whole world!. ... Look, look, streams of blood on every doorstep! Streams of blood from every house! Oh, God, God, who's responsible for this?"

"I blame science! I blame technology! Domin! Myself! All of us! We, we are at fault! For the sake of our megalomania, for the sake of somebody's profits, for the sake of progress, I don't know, for the sake of some tremendous something we have murdered humanity! So now you can crash under the weight of all your greatness! No Genghis Khan has ever erected such an enormous tomb from human bones!"

"They stopped being machines. You see, they realize their superiority and they hate us. They hate everything human."

"A guilty party is being sought. Such action is a favorite means of consolation in the face of calamity."

"Mankind will endure. In twenty years the world will belong to man again; even if it's only to a couple of savages on the tiniest island ... that'll be a start. And as long as there's some small beginning, that's fine. In a thousand years they'll have caught up to where we are now and then surpass even that ... to accomplish what we only dreamed of."

"It was a great thing to be a human being. It was something tremendous. Suddenly I'm conscious of a million sensations buzzing in me like bees in a hive. Gentlemen, it was a great thing."

"You still stand watch, O human star, burning without a flicker, perfect flame, bright and resourceful spirit. Each of your rays a great idea — O torch which passes from hand to hand, from age to age, world without end."

"Robots of the world! Many people have fallen. By seizing the factory we have become the masters of everything. The age of mankind is over. A new world has begun! The rule of Robots!"

"Why are there stars when there are no people? O God, why don't you just extinguish them? — Cool my brow, ancient night! Divine and fair as you always were — O night, what purpose do you serve? There are no lovers, no dreams. O nursemaid, dead as a sleep without dreams, you no longer hallow anyone's prayers. O mother of us all, you don't bless a single heart smitten with love. There is no love."

"Nothing is stranger to man than his own image."

"We've become beings with souls... Something struggles within us. There are moments when something gets into us. Thoughts come to us which are not our own... People are our fathers! The voice that cries out that you want to live; the voice that complains; the voice that reasons; the voice that speaks of eternity — that is their voice!"

"I've found a place that would amaze you. People used to live there, but now it's all overgrown and no one goes there. Absolutely no one — only me... Just a little house and a garden. And two dogs. If you could see how they licked my hands, and their puppies — oh, Primus, there's probably nothing more beautiful! You take them on your lap and cuddle them, and just sit there until sundown not thinking about anything and not worrying about anything. Then when you get up you feel as though you've done a hundred times more than a lot of work. Really, I'm not good for much of anything. Everyone says I'm not cut out for any kind of work. I don't know what I'm good for."

"Helena, do you ever have times when your heart's suddenly struck with the feeling, "Now, now something must happen —""

"O nature, nature, life will not perish! Friends, Helena, life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing — our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds. Now let Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, for my eyes have beheld — beheld Thy deliverance through love, and life shall not perish!"

"I've tried all isolating materials that might possibly prevent the Absolute from getting out of the cellar: ashes, sand, metal walls, but nothing can stop it. I've even tried lining the cellar walls with the works of Professors Krejci, Spencer, and Haeckle, all the Positivists you can think of; if you can believe it, the Absolute penetrates even things like that."

"At the Petrin telegraph station, religion broke out like an epidemic. For no earthly reason, all the telegraph operators on duty were sending out ecstatic messages to the whole world, a sort of new gospel saying that God is coming back down to earth to redeem it ..."

"There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance."

"You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices."

"The only perfection which modern civilisation achieves is mechanical; machines are magnificent and immaculate but the life which serves them or is served by them isn't magnificent or shiny or more perfect or more comely."

"One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction."

"The Continent is noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, more rabid, craftier, more passionate, more convivial, more amorous, hedonistic, vivacious, coarse, garrulous, unruly and somehow less perfect. Please, give me a ticket straight to the Continent."

"I have seen greatness and power, wealth, prosperity and incomparable development. I was never sad that we are a small and unfinished part of the world. To be small, unsettled and uncompleted is a good and courageous mission."

"Of that country [Czechoslovakia], Capek writes: "It[s] was a creed of democracy and freedom . . . in the spirit of the republican and civilian west . . . [and against] the simplified war ideology . . . absolutism and militarism . . ." The pre-war optimism that Capek loved was embodied for him by Tomáš Masaryk, the philosopher who founded the First Republic and was its first president. Masaryk and Capek epitomised what the latter called "pen-and-spirit-minded people" — a phrase on which Capek's view of his role in life turned."

"He imagined himself as a linguist "disclosing the disorders, abuses, incoherences and impressions of expression [which] would lead to the recognition of similar flaws in social thinking". To take responsibility for freedom, besides teaching people to notice other people and things, also meant watching one's words and not being lazy or easily misled...The housewife and her cleaning rituals were as interesting to him as the latest works of lit­erature. Representing a high culture that was coming under pressure from the new mass media of radio and film, he told his readers that high and popular were nothing in themselves. "Culture depends on how things — any thing — are used.""

"Capek finds in science fiction and crime fiction forms that allow his passion for ideas to take on flesh. He is not a writer interested in character in the realist sense. He is captivated by circumstance and chance."

"Letters from England is what nearly every reviewer said it was: a "charming" and "humane" work of travel literature by a man of wry, candid, and cosmopolitan sensibility. Capek brings just the right mixture of admiration and affectionate deprecation to bear on his subject; he gives his curiosity free rein, but tempers both praise and deflation with humor; he is as alive to human accomplishment as he is to human folly, and it is rare that he discovers one unmodified by the other."

"Philosophically as well as politically, Capek was a man of the center, but not in the sense used by hostile critics. The center he was aiming for was not a lukewarm middle ground between extremes. It was a radical center, radical in the original sense of the word: at the root of things. Capek rejected collectivism of any type, but was just as opposed to selfish individualism. He was a passionate democrat and a pluralist. He was often called a relativist because he disliked single vision and preferred to look at everything from many sides … Yet Capek did not believe that truth is relative nor that everyone his or her own truth. Capek is also often described as a pragmatist. But in his belief in the reality of objective truth, he departed from both relativism and from pragmatist thought."

"In the 1930’s, as Capek’s reputation grew, so did the frequency and severity of hostile criticism, personal and literary. To a considerable extent, this was motivated by Capek’s stance of avoiding either extreme, thus antagonizing the left, which had long played a dominant role in Czech culture, as well as the right, which was rapidly gaining power and confidence. … With the rise of fascism, Capek felt compelled to employ his skills in defense of democracy and his threatened homeland. He campaigned tirelessly in this cause, through essays, radio talks and speeches, in spite of the fact that he had always found an overt public role difficult and distasteful. … nobody can doubt Capek’s deep empathy for human suffering and misery, explicit in such pieces as ‘Children of the Poor’ and implicit in just about everything he ever wrote. Above all, nobody can doubt Capek’s dedication to truth … he was a radical in a deep sense, a man who was never satisfied with surface appearance but always tried to get close to the root of things, to that elusive center."

"I read Karel Čapek for the first time when I was a college student long ago in the Thirties. There was no writer like him ... prophetic assurance mixed with surrealistic humour and hard-edged social satire: a unique combination … he is a joy to read."

"To be diligent in one's service became the credo of Capek's life, and he therefore supported anything that would give people a zest for work, for life, for creating a free society. His philosophy called for each individual to seek the positive in this world, so that he can "lift himself" with every step taken under his own power."

"No writer in Czechoslovakia (and very few elsewhere in the world) reacted with such accuracy . . . and with such passion to the Nazi takeover."

"Far up the dim twilight fluttered Moth-wings of vapour and flame: The lights danced over the mountains, Star after star they came. The lights grew thicker unheeded, For silent and still were we; Our hearts were drunk with a beauty Our eyes could never see."

"When I first discovered for myself how near was the King in His beauty I thought I would be the singer of the happiest songs. Forgive me, Spirit of my spirit, for this, that I have found it easier to read the mystery told in tears and understood Thee better in sorrow than in joy; that, though I would not, I have made the way seem thorny, and have wandered in too many byways, imagining myself into moods which held Thee not. I should have parted the true from the false, but I have not yet passed away from myself who am in the words of this book. Time is a swift winnower, and that he will do quickly for me."

"A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet."

"After the spiritual powers, there is no thing in the world more unconquerable than the spirit of nationality. … The spirit of nationality in Ireland will persist even though the mightiest of material powers be its neighbor."

"In ancient shadows and twilights Where childhood had strayed, The world’s great sorrows were born And its heroes were made. In the lost boyhood of Judas Christ was betrayed."

"Let thy young wanderer dream on: Call him not home. A door opens, a breath a voice From the ancient room, Speaks to him now. Be it dark or bright He is knit with his doom."

"We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate."

"Seek on earth what you have found in heaven."

"I remember once quarreling with Yeats who was walking around the room with a sword in one hand muttering spells to ward off evil spirits, and I noticed that every time he passed a plate of plums he put down his unoccupied hand and took a plum and I said, "Yeats, you cannot evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time.""

"When steam first began to pump and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, what are called business habits were intended to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movement rival the train in punctuality."

"There are heaps of things I would like to do, but there is no time to do them. The most gorgeous ideas float before the imagination, but time, money, and alas! inspiration to complete them do not arrive, and for any work to be really valuable we must have time to brood and dream a little over it, or else it is bloodless and does not draw forth the God light in those who read. I believe myself, that there is a great deal too much hasty writing in our magazines and pamphlets. No matter how kindly and well disposed we are when we write we cannot get rid of the essential conditions under which really good literature is produced, love for the art of expression in itself; a feeling for the music of sentences, so that they become mantrams, and the thought sings its way into the soul. To get this, one has to spend what seems a disproportionate time in dreaming over and making the art and workmanship as perfect as possible. I could if I wanted, sit down and write steadily and without any soul; but my conscience would hurt me just as much as if I had stolen money or committed some immorality. To do even a ballad as long as The Dream of the Children, takes months of thought, not about the ballad itself, but to absorb the atmosphere, the special current connected with the subject. When this is done the poem shapes itself readily enough; but without the long, previous brooding it would be no good. So you see, from my slow habit of mind and limited time it is all I can do to place monthly, my copy in the hands of my editor when he comes with a pathetic face to me."

"If the Gods would only inspire me a little more vigorously I would write no end, but as it is I have to sweat over my work, such as it is, and often groan that I never have a chance to do it properly."

"I thought, beloved, to have brought to you A gift of quietness and ease and peace, Cooling your brow as with the mystic dew Dropping from twilight trees. Homeward I go not yet; the darkness grows; Not mine the voice to still with peace divine: From the first fount the stream of quiet flows Through other hearts than mine. Yet of my night I give to you the stars, And of my sorrow here the sweetest gains, And out of hell, beyond its iron bars, My scorn of all its pains."

"For sure the enchanted waters pour through every wind that blows. I think when night towers up aloft and shakes the trembling dew How every high and lonely thought that thrills my being through Is but a ruddy berry dropped down through the purple air, And from the magic tree of life the fruit falls everywhere."

"We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit's fire; For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return If our thought has changed to dream, our will unto desire, As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn."

"In the fire of love we live, or pass by many ways, By unnumbered ways of dream to death."

"Now the quietude of earth Nestles deep my heart within; Friendships new and strange have birth Since I left the city's din."

"Here the ancient mystery Holds its hands out day by day, Takes a chair and croons with me By my cabin built of clay. When the dusky shadow flits, By the chimney nook I see Where the old enchanter sits, Smiles, and waves, and beckons me."

"Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose, Withers once more the old blue flower of day: There where the ether like a diamond glows Its petals fade away."

"The great deep thrills for through it everywhere The breath of beauty blows."

"I saw how all the trembling ages past, Moulded to her by deep and deeper breath, Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last And knows herself in death."

"This mood hath known all beauty for it sees O'erwhelmed majesties In these pale forms, and kingly crowns of gold On brows no longer bold, And through the shadowy terrors of their hell The love for which they fell, And how desire which cast them in the deep Called God too from his sleep."

"Whatever time thy golden eyelids ope They travel to a hope; Not only backward from these low degrees To starry dynasties, But, looking far where now the silence owns And rules from empty thrones, Thou seest the enchanted halls of heaven burn For joy at our return."

"Thy tender kiss hath memory we are kings For all our wanderings. Thy shining eyes already see the after In hidden light and laughter."

"A shaft of fire that falls like dew, And melts and maddens all my blood, From out thy spirit flashes through The burning glass of womanhood."

"I must endure the torturing ray, And, with all beauty, all desire. Ah, time-long must the effort be, And far the way that I must go To bring my spirit unto thee, Behind the glass, within the glow."

"Where we sat at dawn together, while the star-rich heavens shifted, We were weaving dreams in silence, suddenly the veil was lifted. By a hand of fire awakened, in a moment caught and led Upward to the wondrous vision: through the star-mists overhead Flare and flaunt the monstrous highlands; on the sapphire coast of night Fall the ghostly froth and fringes of the ocean of the light."

"We and it and all together flashing through the starry spaces In a tempest dream of beauty lighting up the place of places. Half our eyes behold the glory: half within the spirit's glow Echoes of the noiseless revels and the will of beauty go. By a hand of fire uplifted—to her star-strewn palace brought, To the mystic heart of beauty and the secret of her thought:"

"Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams, Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams, And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose, And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes, And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death."

"O'er the fields of space together following her flying traces, In a radiant tumult thronging, suns and stars and myriad races Mount the spirit spires of beauty, reaching onward to the day When the Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes away Through the glimmering deeps to silence, and within the awful fold Life and joy and love forever vanish as a tale is told, Lost within the mother's being. So the vision flamed and fled, And before the glory fallen every other dream lay dead."

"I am the sunlight in the heart, the silver moonglow in the mind; My laughter runs and ripples through the wavy tresses of the wind. I am the fire upon the hills, the dancing flame that leads afar Each burning-hearted wanderer, and I the dear and homeward star."

"They knew me from the dawn of time: if Hermes beats his rainbow wings, If Angus shakes his locks of light, or golden-haired Apollo sings, It matters not the name, the land; my joy in all the gods abides: Even in the cricket in the grass some dimness of me smiles and hides. For joy of me the day star glows, and in delight and wild desire The peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire, Where in the vastness too I burn through summer nights and ages long, And with the fiery footed Watchers shake in myriad dance and song."

"Not unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways: One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days."

"For beauty called to beauty and there thronged at the enchanter's will The vanished hours of love that burn within the Ever-living still."

"As to her worshippers she came descending from her glowing skies So Aphrodite I have seen with shining eyes look through your eyes: One gleam of the ancestral face which lighted up the dawn for me: One fiery visitation of the love the gods desire in thee!"

"The blue dusk ran between the streets; my love was winged within my mind; It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind. To-day was past and dead for me for from to-day my feet had run Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon."

"The tower of heaven turns darker blue; a starry sparkle now begins; The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins Come back to me."

"Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid: The wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid, One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide, Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side. Oh, light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings, While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things."

"All the morn a spirit gay Breathes within my heart a rhyme, 'Tis but hide and seek we play In and out the courts of Time."

"Where the ring of twilight gleams Round the sanctuary wrought, Whispers haunt me — in my dreams We are one yet know it not. Some for beauty follow long Flying traces; some there be Seek thee only for a song: I to lose myself in thee."

"Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods, Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods, Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things; Clothing the vast with a familiar face; Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race."

"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, Though there no house fires burn nor bright eyes gaze, We rise, but by the symbol charioted, Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways By these the soul unto the vast has wings And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."

"What of all the will to do? It has vanished long ago, For a dream-shaft pierced it through From the Unknown Archer's bow."

"Only in the self we grope To the misty end of time: Truth has put an end to hope. What of all the heart to love? Sadder than for will or soul, No light lured it on above; Love has found itself the whole."

"Twilight, a timid fawn, went glimmering by, And night, the dark blue hunter, followed fast: Ceaseless pursuit and flight were in the sky, But the long chase had ceased for us at last."

"The twilight fleeted away in pearl on the stream, And night, like a diamond dome, stood still in our dream."

"We loved in infinite spaces, forgetting here The breasts that were lit with life and the lips so near; Till the wizard willows waved in the wind and drew Me away from the fulness of love and down to you."

"Our love was so vast that it filled the heavens up: But the soft white form I held was an empty cup, When the willows called me back to earth with their sigh, And we moved as shades through the deep that was you and I."

"Hush, not a whisper! Let your heart alone go dreaming. Dream unto dream may pass: deep in the heart alone Murmurs the Mighty One his solemn undertone."

"Canst thou not see adown the silver cloudland streaming Rivers of faery light, dewdrop on dewdrop falling, Starfire of silver flames, lighting the dark beneath? And what enraptured hosts burn on the dusky heath! Come thou away with them, for Heaven to Earth is calling."

"Drink: the immortal waters quench the spirit's longing. Art thou not now, bright one, all sorrow past, in elation, Made young with joy, grown brother-hearted with the vast, Whither thy spirit wending flits the dim stars past Unto the Light of Lights in burning adoration."

"Image of beauty, when I gaze on thee, Trembling I waken to a mystery, How through one door we go to life or death By spirit kindled or the sensual breath."

"The life which passes mourns its wasted hour. And, ah, to think how thin the veil that lies Between the pain of hell and paradise!"

"We are desert leagues apart; Time is misty ages now Since the warmth of heart to heart Chased the shadows from my brow."

"Oh, I am so old, meseems I am next of kin to Time, The historian of her dreams From the long forgotten prime."

"Though the dream of love may tire, In the ages long agone There were ruby hearts of fire — Ah, the daughters of the dawn!"

"Age is no more near than youth To the sceptre and the crown. Vain the wisdom, vain the truth; Do not lay thy rapture down."

"When the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies, All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow, and silver gleam, With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes; I am one with the twilight's dream."

"Aye, and deep and deep and deeper let me drink and draw, From the olden fountain more than light or peace or dream, Such primeval being as o'erfills the heart with awe, Growing one with its silent stream."

"It was the fairy of the place, Moving within a little light, Who touched with dim and shadowy grace The conflict at its fever height. It seemed to whisper 'Quietness,' Then quietly itself was gone: Yet echoes of its mute caress Were with me as the years went on."

"It was the warrior within Who called 'Awake, prepare for fight: Yet lose not memory in the din: Make of thy gentleness thy might: 'Make of thy silence words to shake The long-enthroned kings of earth: Make of thy will the force to break Their towers of wantonness and mirth.'"

"It was the wise all-seeing soul Who counselled neither war nor peace: 'Only be thou thyself that goal In which the wars of time shall cease.'"

"Search for the high austere and lonely way The Spirit moves in through eternities. Ah, in the soul what memories arise! And with what yearning inexpressible, Rising from long forgetfulness I turn To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still: White for Thy whiteness all desires burn. Ah, with what longing once again I turn!"

"The offerings arise: Hazes of rainbow light, Pure crystal, blue, and gold, Through dreamland take their flight; And 'mid the sacrifice God moveth as of old. In miracles of fire He symbols forth his days; In gleams of crystal light Reveals what pure pathways Lead to the soul's desire, The silence of the height."

"Of the Earth, of the Mother, my heart with her heart in accord: As I lie mid the cool green tresses that mantle her breast I begin with the grass once again to be bound to the Lord."

"On the laugh of a child I am borne to the joy of the King."

"Well, when all is said and done Best within my narrow way, May some angel of the sun Muse memorial o'er my clay: 'Here was beauty all betrayed From the freedom of her state; From her human uses stayed On an idle rhyme to wait."

"He has built his monument With the winds of time at strife, Who could have before he went Written in the book of life. To the stars from which he came Empty handed he goes home; He who might have wrought in flame Only traced upon the foam.'"

"Silence and coolness now the earth enfold: Jewels of glittering green, long mists of gold, Hazes of nebulous silver veil the height, And shake in tremors through the shadowy night. Heard through the stillness, as in whispered words, The wandering God-guided wings of birds Ruffle the dark. The little lives that lie Deep hid in grass join in a long-drawn sigh More softly still; and unheard through the blue The falling of innumerable dew, Lifts with grey fingers all the leaves that lay Burned in the heat of the consuming day."

"Sacred thy laughter on the air, Holy thy lightest word that fell, Proud the innumerable hair That waved at the enchanter's spell. Oh Master of the Beautiful, Creating us from hour to hour, Give me this vision to the full To see in lightest things thy power! This vision give, no heaven afar, No throne, and yet I will rejoice, Knowing beneath my feet a star, Thy word in every wandering voice."

"Only in clouds and dreams I felt those souls In the abyss, each fire hid in its clod, From which in clouds and dreams the spirit rolls Into the vast of God."

"Heart-hidden from the outer things I rose; The spirit woke anew in nightly birth Unto the vastness where forever glows The star-soul of the earth. There all alone in primal ecstasy, Within her depths where revels never tire, The Olden Beauty shines: each thought of me Is veined through with its fire."

"Still as the holy of holies breathes the vast Within its crystal depths the stars grow dim; Fire on the altar of the hills at last Burns on the shadowy rim. Moments that holds all moments; white upon The verge it trembles; then like mists of flowers Break from the fairy fountain of the dawn The hues of many hours."

"In day from some titanic past it seems As if a thread divine of memory runs; Born ere the Mighty One began his dreams, Or yet were stars and suns."

"Each dream remembered is a burning-glass, Where through to darkness from the Light of Lights Its rays in splendour pass."

"I am the tender voice calling 'Away,' Whispering between the beatings of the heart, And inaccessible in dewy eyes I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips, Lingering between white breasts inviolate, And fleeting ever from the passionate touch, I shine afar, till men may not divine Whether it is the stars or the beloved They follow with wrapt spirit."

"I can enchant the trees and rocks, and fill The dumb brown lips of earth with mystery, Make them reveal or hide the god. I breathe A deeper pity than all love, myself Mother of all, but without hands to heal: Too vast and vague, they know me not."

"I am the heartbreak over fallen things, The sudden gentleness that stays the blow, And I am in the kiss that foemen give Pausing in battle, and in the tears that fall Over the vanquished foe, and in the highest; Among the Danaan gods, I am the last Council of mercy in their hearts where they Mete justice from a thousand starry thrones."

"There were many burning hours on the heart-sweet tide, And we passed away from ourselves, forgetting all The immortal moods that faded, the god who died, Hastening away to the King on a distant call."

"There were ruby dews were shed when the heart was riven, And passionate pleading and prayers to the dead we had wronged; And we passed away unremembering and unforgiven, Hastening away to the King for the peace we longed."

"Who would think this quiet breather From the world had taken flight? Yet within the form we see there Wakes the golden King to-night."

"When he wakes, the dreamy-hearted, He will know not whence he came, And the light from which he parted Be the seraph's sword of flame, And behind it hosts supernal Guarding the lost paradise, And the tree of life eternal From the weeping human eyes."

"The grey road whereupon we trod became as holy ground: The eve was all one voice that breathed its message with no sound: And burning multitudes pour through my heart, too bright, too blind, Too swift and hurried in their flight to leave their tale behind."

"And sun and moon and starry fires and earth and air and sea Are creatures from the deep let loose who pause in ecstasy, Or wing their wild and heavenly way until again they find The ancient deep and fade therein, enraptured, bright and blind."

"How shallow is this mere that gleams! Its depth of blue is from the skies; And from a distant sun the dreams And lovely light within your eyes."

"We deem our love so infinite Because the Lord is everywhere, And love awakening is made bright And bathed in that diviner air."

"We go on our enchanted way And deem our hours immortal hours, Who are but shadow kings that play With mirrored majesties and powers."

"We are tired who follow after Phantasy and truth that flies: You with only look and laughter Stain our hearts with richest dyes."

"Pain and penitence forsaking, Hearts like cloisters dim and grey, By your laughter lured, awaking Join with you the dance of day."

"I needed love no words could say; She drew me softly nigh her chair, My head upon her knees to lay, With cool hands that caressed my hair. She sat with hands as if to bless, And looked with grave, ethereal eyes; Ensouled by ancient quietness, A gentle priestess of the Wise."

"When the lips I breathed upon Asked for such love as equals claim I looked where all the stars were gone Burned in the day's immortal flame. "Come thou like yon great dawn to me From darkness vanquished, battles done: Flame unto flame shall flow and be Within thy heart and mine as one."."

"By many a dream of God and man my thoughts in shining flocks were led: But as I went through Patrick Street the hopes and prophecies were dead. The hopes and prophecies were dead: they could not blossom where the feet Walked amid rottenness, or where the brawling shouters stamped the street."

"Where was the beauty that the Lord gave man when first he towered in pride? But one came by me at whose word the bitter condemnation died. His brows were crowned with thorns of light: his eyes were bright as one who sees The starry palaces shine o'er the sparkle of the heavenly seas. 'Is it not beautiful?' he cried. Our Faery Land of Hearts' Desire Is mingled through the mire and mist, yet stainless keeps its lovely fire. The pearly phantoms with blown hair are dancing where the drunkards reel: The cloud frail daffodils shine out where filth is splashing from the heel. O sweet, and sweet, and sweet to hear, the melodies in rivers run: The rapture of their crowded notes is yet the myriad voice of One."

"We cannot for forgetfulness forego the reverence due to them Who wear at times they do not guess the sceptre and the diadem. As bright a crown as this was theirs when first they from the Father sped; Yet look with deeper eyes and still the ancient beauty is not dead. He mingled with the multitude. I saw their brows were crowned and bright, A light around the shadowy heads, a shadow round the head of light."

"Our true hearts are forever lonely: A wistfulness is in our thought: Our lights are like the dawns which only Seem bright to us and yet are not."

"Something you see in me I wis not: Another heart in you I guess: A stranger's lips — but thine I kiss not, Erring in all my tenderness."

"I sometimes think a mighty lover Takes every burning kiss we give: His lights are those which round us hover: For him alone our lives we live."

"Ah, sigh for us whose hearts unseeing Point all their passionate love in vain, And blinded in the joy of being, Meet only when pain touches pain."

"Here in these shades the Ancient knows itself, the Soul, And out of slumber waking starts unto the goal."

"Dread deities, the giant powers that warred on men Grow tender brothers and gay children once again; Fades every hate away before the Mother's breast Where all the exiles of the heart return to rest."

"I have wept a million tears: Pure and proud one, where are thine, What the gain though all thy years In unbroken beauty shine? All your beauty cannot win Truth we learn in pain and sighs: You can never enter in To the circle of the wise."

"He bent above: so still her breath What air she breathed he could not say, Whether in worlds of life or death: So softly ebbed away, away The life that had been light to him, So fled her beauty leaving dim The emptying chambers of his heart Thrilled only by the pang and smart, The dull and throbbing agony That suffers still, yet knows not why."

"Love's immortality so blind Dreams that all things with it conjoined Must share with it immortal day: But not of this—but not of this— The touch, the eyes, the laugh, the kiss, Fall from it and it goes its way."

"Ah, immortality so blind, To dream all things with it conjoined Must follow it from star to star And share with it immortal years. The memory, yearning, grief, and tears, Fall from it and it goes afar."

"He felt an inner secret joy! A spirit of unfettered will Through light and darkness moving still Within the All to find its own, To be immortal and alone."

"I pitied one whose tattered dress Was patched, and stained with dust and rain; He smiled on me; I could not guess The viewless spirit's wide domain."

"He said, 'The royal robe I wear Trails all along the fields of light: Its silent blue and silver bear For gems the starry dust of night.' 'The breath of joy unceasingly Waves to and fro its folds starlit, And far beyond earth's misery I live and breathe the joy of it.'"

"The wonder of the world is o'er: The magic from the sea is gone: There is no unimagined shore, No islet yet to venture on. The Sacred Hazels' blooms are shed, The Nuts of Knowledge harvested."

"Oh, what is worth this lore of age If time shall never bring us back Our battle with the gods to wage Reeling along the starry track. The battle rapture here goes by In warring upon things that die."

"The power is ours to make or mar Our fate as on the earliest morn, The Darkness and the Radiance are Creatures within the spirit born. Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might Forget how we imagined light. Not yet are fixed the prison bars: The hidden light the spirit owns If blown to flame would dim the stars And they who rule them from their thrones: And the proud sceptred spirits thence Would bow to pay us reverence."

"Let me dream only with my heart, Love first, and after see: Know thy diviner counterpart Before I kneel to thee. So in thy motions all expressed Thy angel I may view: I shall not on thy beauty rest, But Beauty's ray in you."

"Aye, after victory, the crown; Yet through the fight no word of cheer; And what would win and what go down No word could help, no light make clear. A thousand ages onward led Their joys and sorrows to that hour; No wisdom weighed, no word was said, For only what we were had power."

"Who is that goddess to whom men should pray But her from whom their hearts have turned away, Out of whose virgin being they were born, Whose mother nature they have named in scorn Calling its holy substance common clay. Yet from this so despised earth was made The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed Their generations with a light caress, And from some image of whose loveliness The heart built up high heaven when it prayed."

"Ah, when I think this earth on which we tread Hath borne these blossoms of the lovely dead, And made the living heart I love to beat, I look with sudden awe beneath my feet As you with erring reverence overhead."

"Sirs, I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilisation stir like a quaking bog. You do not seem to realise that your assumption that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in the industries you control is one that becomes less and less tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life."

"The relation of landlord and tenant is not an ideal one, but any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality. Despotisms endure while they are benevolent, and aristocracies while noblesse oblige is not a phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile. Even an oligarchy might be permanent if the spirit of human kindness, which harmonises all things otherwise incompatible, is present."

"The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you. No doubt, you have rights on your side. No doubt, some of you suffered without just cause. But nothing which has been done to you cries aloud to Heaven for condemnation as your own actions."

"You assumed that no other guarantees than those you asked were possible, and you determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one third of the population of the city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives and the hunger of their children. We read in the Dark Ages of the rack and thumb screw. But these iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge of men in dungeons and torture chambers. Even in the Dark Ages, humanity could not endure the sight of such suffering, and it learnt of such misuse of power by slow degrees, through rumour, and when it was certain it razed its Bastilles to their foundations. It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly upon starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride. You, masters, asked men to do that which masters of labour in any other city in these islands had not dared to do. You insolently demanded of those men who were members of a trade union that they should resign from that union; and from those who were not members, you insisted on a vow that they would never join it."

"Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity. If you had between you collectively a portion of human soul as large as a threepenny bit, you would have sat night and day with the representatives of labour, trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful of the women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong against you. But no! You reminded labour you could always have your three square meals a day while it went hungry."

"Cry aloud to heaven for new souls. The souls you have got cast upon the screens of publicity appear like the horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and revealed to us by the cinematographer. You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by your victory. The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they — it is you who are the blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order."

"There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not now show that you have some humanity still among you. Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere it is too late."

"Their dream had left me numb and cold, But yet my spirit rose in pride, Refashioning in burnished gold The images of those who died, Or were shut in the penal cell. Here's to you, Pearse, your dream not mine, But yet the thought, for this you fell, Has turned life's water into wine."

"You who have died on Eastern hills Or fields of France as undismayed, Who lit with interlinked wills The long heroic barricade, You, too, in all the dreams you had, Thought of some thing for Ireland done."

"Life cannot utter words more great Than life may meet by sacrifice, High words were equaled by high fate, You paid the price. You paid the price."

"The hope lives on age after age, Earth with its beauty might be won For labor as a heritage, For this has Ireland lost a son."

"Here's to you, men I never met, Yet hope to meet behind the veil, Thronged on some starry parapet, That looks down upon Innisfail, And sees the confluence of dreams That clashed together in our night, One river, born from many streams, Roll in one blaze of blinding light."

"You would have understood me, had you waited; I could have loved you, dear! as well as he: Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated Always to disagree."

"What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter: Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid. Though all the words we ever spake were bitter, Shall I reproach you, dead?"

"Nay, let this earth, your portion, likewise cover All the old anger, setting us apart: Always, in all, in truth was I your lover; Always, I held your heart."

"I have met other women who were tender, As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare. Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender, I who had found you fair?"

"Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses Love that in life was not to be our part: On your low lying mound between the roses, Sadly I cast my heart."

"I read Æ’s poems when I was a child in Australia. Later I came to England to see my relatives. But before I did that, I sent a poem to Æ, who was then editing The Irish Statesman, and with all the arrogance of youth I didn’t put any letter with it explaining myself or saying that I was Irish or anything. I just sent it with a stamped addressed envelope. And sure enough, the stamped envelope came back. But in it was a check for two guineas and a letter that said, “I’m accepting your poem, which is a very good one, and I think it could not have been written by anyone who wasn’t Irish. If you’re ever coming to Ireland, be sure to come and see me.” Since I was going to Ireland, I did go to see him and was greatly welcomed and more poems were taken. I felt immediate mutuality with him, this great elderly man bothering about me. But he bothered about all young poets. They were always welcome. After our visit he said to me, “On your way back through Dublin you come and see me again.” I said, “Of course, I will.” But when the time arrived and I was back in Dublin, an awful timidity came upon me. I thought he was a great man and I shouldn’t take up his time; he was doing this for politesse. And so I refrained from going to see him and went back to England. Sometime later when I opened the door, there was Æ. He said to me, “You’re a faithless girl. You promised to see me on your way back through Dublin and you didn’t.” And he added, “I meant to give you my books then and, as you weren’t there, I brought them.” And there were all his books."

"These men — Yeats, James Stephens, and the rest — had aristocratic minds. For them, the world was not fragmented. An idea did not suddenly grow … all alone and separate. For them, all things had long family trees. They saw nothing shameful or silly in myths and fairy stories, nor did they shovel them out of sight and some cupboard marked "Only For Children." They were always willing to concede that there was more things in heaven and earth than philosophy dreamed of. They allowed for the unknown. And, as you can imagine, I took great heart from this. It was Æ who showed me how to look and learn from one's own writing. "Popkins" he said once — he always called her just plain Popkins, whether deliberately mistaking the name or not I never knew. His humor was always subtle — "Popkins had she lived in another age, in the old times to which she certainly belongs, she would undoubtedly have had long golden tresses, a wreath of flowers in one hand, and perhaps a spear in the other. Her eyes would have been like the sea, her nose comely, and on her feet winged sandals. But, this age being the Kali Yuga, as the Indus call it — in our terms, the Iron Age — she comes in habiliments suited to it.""

"Let's define the word, what racist is - "A person who believes that their race to be superior to another's." I've never advocated that. And I challenge anyone to tell me one thing that I've said that is racist. Criticism is not racism. Accountability is not racism. And that's what I've tried to say over the years."

"...What I can't understand is why come here and try and change our country into the place that you've come from? And all I ask of people is come here, respect our country, respect our laws, our culture, our way of life. Be Australian, join us, enjoy this beautiful country and everything that it has to offer."

"I’m not going to be silenced on yet another attack involving Islamic extremism - especially one occurring in the state I am representing in the Senate, Australians know what the problem is. It's time this government wakes up and starts looking after Australians' welfare before those from other countries."

"If politicians continue to promote separatism in Australia, they should not continue to hold their seats in this parliament. They are not truly representing all Australians, and I call on the people to throw them out. To survive in peace and harmony, united and strong, we must have one people, one nation, one flag."

"We now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer funded "industries" that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups."

"This nation is being divided into black and white, and the present system encourages this. I am fed up with being told, 'This is our land.' Well, where the hell do I go? I was born here, and so were my parents and children. I will work beside anyone and they will be my equal but I draw the line when told I must pay and continue paying for something that happened over 200 years ago. Like most Australians, I worked for my land; no-one gave it to me."

"I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country."

"A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united."

"I do not believe that the colour of one's skin determines whether you are disadvantaged."

"I may be only a "fish and chip shop lady", but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping."

"If this government wants to be fair dinkum, then it must stop kowtowing to financial markets, international organisations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people. The Howard government must become visionary and be prepared to act, even at the risk of making mistakes."

"My pride and patriotism were instilled in me from an early age when I watched the Australian flag raised every morning at school and sang the national anthem; watching our athletes compete on the world stage, proud to salute the Australian flag being raised to honour them as they took their place on podiums. It is about belonging, respect and commitment to fight for Australia. This will never be traded or given up for the mantras of diversity or tolerance. Australia had a national identity before Federation, and it had nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with belonging."

"Australians have never been permitted to vote on immigration and multiculturalism. When have we been asked or consulted about our population?"

"High immigration is only beneficial to multinationals, banks and big business, seeking a larger market while everyday Australians suffer from this massive intake. They are waiting longer for their life-saving operation. The unemployment queues grow longer — and even longer when government jobs are given priority to migrants. Our city roads have become parking lots. Schools are bursting at the seams. Our aged and sick are left behind to fend for themselves. And many cities and towns struggle to provide water for an ever-growing population. Our service providers struggle to cope, due to a lack of government funding, leaving it to charities to pick up the pieces."

"In my first speech in 1996 I said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians. This was not said out of disrespect for Asians but was meant as a slap in the face to both the Liberal and Labor governments who opened the floodgates to immigration, targeting cultures purely for the vote, as expressed by former Labor minister Barry Jones — to such an extent that society changed too rapidly due to migrants coming in the front door but also the back door, via New Zealand."

"The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq."

"They are the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy and the penetrating venom."

"God honoured us and so we harvested their heads and tore up their bodies in many places: the United Nations in Baghdad; the coalition forces in Karbala; the Italians in Nasiriya; the US forces on Khalidiya Bridge; the US intelligence in Al-Shahin Hotel and the Republican Palace in Baghdad; the CIA in the Rashid Hotel; and the Polish forces in Al-Hilla."

"When recalling historical experience, the testimony of ancient times, the proofs of the present reality, and the things that we are experiencing today, we begin to truly understand God's words: "They are the enemies; so beware of them. The curse of Allah be on them!" Ibn Taymiyyah was right in his description of these people when they repudiated the people of Islam. He said: This is why they cooperated with the infidels and the Tartars...They were the main cause of the invasion of Muslim countries by Genghis Khan...Some of them cooperated with the Tartars and Franks (European Crusaders)...some of them (Shiites) backed the Christians.....They (Shiites) harbor more evil and rancor against Muslims, big and small, devout and non-devout, than anyone else. ...They enjoy repudiating and cursing Muslim leaders, especially the orthodox caliphs and the ulema (clerics). To them, anyone who does not believe in the infallible Imam (Al-Mahdi) is a nonbeliever in God and the prophet... whenever Christians and infidels triumphed over, it was a day of jubilation ...This is the end of what Shaykh-al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah said about them. It is as if he is living among us today, an eyewitness of what is taking place, and saying...They always support infidels, including Jews and Christians. They help them in killing Muslims."

"The mujahideen will give America a taste of the degradation you have inflicted on the Iraqi people."

"These people who are using this prisoner as a playing card didn't know our religion very well. In true Islam, they don't kill women and young children."

"The fruits of jihad come after much patience and a lengthy stay in the battlefield...which could last months and years."

"We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it."

"We promise God that the dog...Bush will not enjoy peace of mind and that his army will not have a good life as long as our hearts are beating."

"The killing of infidels by any method including martyrdom (suicide) operations has been sanctified by many scholars even if it means killing innocent Muslims...The shedding of Muslim blood...is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad."

"We declare that the Iraqi army is an apostate, agent army allied to the crusaders and came to destroy Islam and Muslims. We will fight it."

"The storm that hit the United States was the result of every mother or father's prayer, or an orphaned son, or a woman whose honour was taken away in Iraq or Afghanistan."

"Al-Qaeda organisation in Iraq...has declared war against Shias in all of Iraq."

"The battles are many, and the names used are varied. But the goal is one: a Crusader-Rafidite [Rafidites – Shiites, used derogatorily by Sunni extremists] war against the Sunnis."

"We ask God to have mercy on the Muslims, whom we did not intend to target, even if they were in hotels which are centres of immorality."

"America has realised today that its tanks, armies and Shia agents will not be able to end the battle with the mujahideen."

"E o abade pançudo que à tardinha, à varanda, palita o dente furado saboreando o seu café com um ar paterno, traz dentro em si os indistintos restos dum Torquemada."

"No fundo da China existe um mandarim mais rico que todos os reis de que a fábula ou a história contam. Dele nada conheces, nem o nome, nem o semblante, nem a seda de que se veste. Para que tu herdes os seus cabedais infindáveis, basta que toques essa campainha, posta a teu lado, sobre um livro. Ele soltará apenas um suspiro, nesses confins da Mongólia. Será então um cadáver: e tu verás a teus pés mais ouro do que pode sonhar a ambição de um avaro. Tu, que me lês e és um homem mortal, tocarás tu a campainha?"

"Sobre a nudez forte da verdade o manto diáfano da fantasia."

"O amor espiritualiza o homem – e materializa a mulher."

"Concluí, como se conclui sempre em Filosofia, que me encontrava diante duma Causa Primaria, portanto impenetrável."

"O esforço humano consegue, quando muito, converter um proletariado faminto numa burguesia farta; mas surge logo das entranhas da sociedade um proletariado pior. Jesus tinha razão: haverá sempre pobres entre nós. Donde se prova que esta humanidade é o maior erro que jamais Deus cometeu."

"Em geral, nós outros, os Portugueses, só começamos a ser idiotas – quando chegamos à idade da razão. Em pequenos temos todos uma pontinha de génio."

"As formas superiores do pensamento tem uma tendência fatal a tornar-se na futura lei revelada: e toda a filosofia termina, nos seus velhos dias, por ser religião."

"Talvez um dia, quando o socialismo for religião do Estado, se vejam em nichos de templo, com uma lamparina de frente, as imagens dos santos padres da revolução: Proudhon de óculos. Bakunine parecendo um urso sob as suas peles russas, Karl Marx apoiado ao cajado simbólico do pastor de almas tristes."

"Jovens de letras, meus amigos, ponde vossos olhos neste exemplo de ouro! Sê prudente, mancebo; nunca, ao entrar na carreira literária, publiques poema ou novela sem a antecipada precaução de ter sido durante alguns anos – primeiro-ministro de Inglaterra!"

"O Inglês, sem chá, bate-se frouxamente."

"No entanto a Inglaterra goza por algum tempo a «grande vitória do Afeganistão» com a certeza de ter de recomeçar daqui a dez anos ou quinze anos; porque nem pode conquistar e anexar um vasto reino, que é grande como a França, nem pode consentir, colados à sua ilharga, uns poucos de milhões de homens fanáticos, batalhadores e hostis. A «política», portanto, é debilitá-los periodicamente, com uma invasão arruinadora. São as fortes necessidades de um grande império."

"Estranha gente, para quem é fora de dúvida que ninguém pode ser moral sem ler a Bíblia, ser forte sem jogar o críquete e ser gentleman sem ser inglês! E é isto que os torna detestados. Nunca se fundem, nunca se desinglesam."

"O inglês cai sobre as ideias e as maneiras dos outros como uma massa de granito na água: e ali fica pesando, com a sua Bíblia, os seus clubes, os seus sports, os seus prejuízos, a sua etiqueta, o seu egoísmo – fazendo na circulação da vida alheia um incomodativo tropeço. É por isso que nos países onde vive há séculos é ele ainda o estrangeiro."

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi."

"Un palazzo del quale si conoscessero tutte le stanze non era degno di essere abitato."

"Un contadino che mi dà il suo pezzo di pecorino mi fa un regalo più grande di Giulio Làscari quando m’invita a pranzo. Il guaio è che il pecorino mi dà la nausea; e così non resta che la gratitudine che non si vede e il naso arricciato dal disgusto che si vede fin troppo."

"Che cosa se ne farebbe il Senato di me, di un legislatore inesperto cui manca la facoltà d'ingannare sé stesso, questo requisito essenziale per chi voglia guidare gli altri?"

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

"I giovani sentono i dolori più acerbamente dei vecchi: per questi l'uscita di sicurezza è più vicina."

"His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open."

"Perhaps the greatest novel of the century."

"No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does."

"Non sempre ciò che vien dopo è progresso."

"All'avvocato bisogna raccontar le cose chiare: a noi tocca poi a imbrogliarle."

"È uno de' vantaggi di questo mondo, quello di poter odiare ed esser odiati, senza conoscersi."

"Ma la pratica generale ha voluto che [la condizione di non dir nulla a nessuno] obblighi soltanto a non confidare il segreto che ad un amico egualmente fidato, e imponendogli la condizione medesima. Così d'amico fidato in amico fidato, il segreto gira e gira per quella immensa catena, tanto che giunge all'orecchio di colui o di coloro a cui il primo che ha parlato intendeva appunto di non lasciarlo giunger mai."

"Ma cos'è mai la storia, diceva spesso don Ferrante, senza la politica? Una guida che cammina, cammina, con nessuno dietro che impari la strada, e per conseguenza butta via i suoi passi; come la politica senza la storia è uno che cammina senza guida."

"The truly historical character – also and perhaps even above all from the point of view of civil, social and ethical history: “national identity”, as we would say today – of Camporesi's reading of Artusi is particularly highlighted and, so to speak, summarised in the famous statement by Camporesi that “”'Science in the Kitchen'“ did more for national unification than ”'I Promessi Sposi . Artusi's tastes, in fact, succeeded in creating a code of national identification where Manzoni's stylistic and phonetic features failed."

"A big book is a big misfortune."

"Nothing unattested do I sing."

"Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμήρου σαφηνίζειν"

"[...] ὅσσα τ' ὀδόντωνἔνδοθι νείαιράν τ' εἰς ἀχάριστον ἔδυ, καὶ τῶν οὐδὲν ἔμεινεν ἐς αὔριον· ὅσσα δ' ἀκουαῖς εἰσεθέμην, ἔτι μοι μοῦνα πάρεστι τάδε."

"Εἰπέ τις, Ἡράκλειτε, τεὸν μόρον ἐς δέ με δάκρυ ἤγαγεν ἐμνήσθην δ᾿ ὁσσάκις ἀμφότεροι ἠέλιον λέσχῃ κατεδύσαμεν. ..."

"Two goddesses now must Cyprus adore; The Muses are ten, the Graces are four; Stella's wit is so charming, so sweet her fair face; She shines a new Venus, a Muse, and a Grace."

"Here sleeps Saon, of Acanthus, son of Dicon, a holy sleep: say not that the good die."

"O Charidas, what of the under world? Great darkness. And what of the resurrection? A lie. And Pluto? A fable; we perish utterly."

"Set a thief to catch a thief."

"The Graces, three erewhile, are three no more; A fourth is come with perfume sprinkled o'er. 'Tis Berenice blest and fair; were she Away the Graces would no Graces be."

"His blend of sensitivity and detachment, elegance, wit, and learning, had a profound influence on later Roman poets, especially Catullus, Ovid, and Propertius (the last thought of himself as the Roman Callimachus), and through them on the whole European literary tradition."

"The most outstanding intellect of this generation, the greatest poet that the Hellenistic age produced, and historically one of the most important figures in the development of Graeco-Roman (and hence European) literature."

"The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New."

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."

"The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you."

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."

"If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best."

"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them."

"No government functions without the grease of corruption."

"[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo."

"Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books.""

"A tropical Mussolini"

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, [[Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."

"I admire him a lot. He has done a lot to bring the Latin American situation to the American consciousness."

"Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes."

"By making this chair five times as expensive, three times heavier, half as comfortable, and only a fraction as beautiful, an architect can make a good name for himself."

"[Concerning the love La Fontaine felt for animals] He follows their emotions, he represents their reasonings, he becomes tender, he becomes gay, he participates in their feelings. The fact is, he lived in them. […] The animals contain all the materials of man-sensations, judgments, images."

"J'ai beaucoup étudié les philosophes et les chats. La sagesse des chats est infiniment supérieure."

"The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies."

"One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and unhealthy forms of the old combative societies, by what a backward step toward egoistic and brutal instincts, toward the sentiments, manner and morality of ancient cities and barbaric tribes, we know all too well."

"Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France."

"The critic who attempted to carry on 's ideas, who developed them in his own way and added his own distinct and remarkable contribution, was Hippolyte Taine. As an influence on all literary output since their time, the effect of the ideas of these two men is still extraordinary ..."

"M. Taine, looking as usual for formulas and labels, says that the most complete description of Balzac is that he was a man of business—a man of business in debt."

"The world belongs to women. In other words, to death. But everyone lies about it."

"Stop being astounded by the realization that sex is the object of such misunderstanding and of such automatic clumsiness that it implies either a universal loathing or a universal veneration (which are much the same thing)."

"Nombres est écrit avant mai 1968, coïncidence improbable mais profonde."

"If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality."

"Inexorable as to principles, tolerant and impartial as to persons."

"The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads."

"Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea. Were it otherwise, what would be the use or value of art?"

"Nature is for art the garb of the Eternal. The real is the finite expression and representation of the true ; forms are the limits affixed by time and space to the power of life. Nature, reality, and form, should, all of them, be so rendered and expressed by art, as to reveal to mankind some ray of the truth — a vaster and profounder sentiment of life."

"Art is not the fancy or caprice of an individual. It is the mighty voice of God and the universe, as heard by the chosen spirit, and repeated in tones of harmony to mankind. Should that omnipotent voice strike too directly upon the mortal ear, it would stun and suspend all human action, even as Pantheism crushed the ancient Oriental world."

"Art is no isolated, unconnected, or inexplicable phenomenon. It draws its life from the life of the universe, and with the universe it ascends from epoch to epoch towards the Almighty. It owes its power over the souls of men to that collective life — even as the trees and plants draw their life from earth, the common mother; and its power would be destroyed should it attempt to forsake its source."

"Ideas grow quickly when watered with the blood of martyrs."

"The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life."

"Every mission constitutes a pledge of duty. Every man is bound to consecrate his every faculty to its fulfilment. He will derive his rule of action from the profound conviction of that duty."

"One sole God; One sole ruler, — his Law; One sole interpreter of that law — Humanity."

"Hope nothing from foreign governments. They will never be really willing to aid you until you have shown that you are strong enough to conquer without them."

"Your first duties-first as regards importance-are, as I have already told you, towards Humanity. You are men before you are either citizens or fathers. If you do not embrace the whole human family in your affection, if you do not bear witness to your belief in the Unity of that family, consequent upon the Unity of God...if, wheresoever a fellow-creature suffers, or the dignity of human nature is violated by falsehood or tyranny-you are not ready, if able, to aid the unhappy, and do not feel called upon to combat, if able, for the redemption of the betrayed or oppressed-you violate your law of life, you comprehend not that Religion which will be the guide and blessing of the future."

"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is the Thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory."

"So long as a single one amongst your brothers has no vote to represent him in the development of the national life, so long as a single man, able and willing to work, languishes in poverty through want of work to do, you have no country in the sense in which country ought to exist-the country of all and for all."

"So long as you are ready to die for Humanity, the life of your country is immortal."

"The new claim on the part of the toiling multitude, the new sense of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do, arise in reality from the same source. They are in fact the same “social compunction,” and, in spite of their widely varying manifestations, logically converge into the same movement. Mazzini once preached, “the consent of men and your own conscience are two wings given you whereby you may rise to God.” It is so easy for the good and powerful to think that they can rise by following the dictates of conscience by pursuing their own ideals, leaving those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellowmen."

"I encountered the influence of Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me...To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Mazzini's birth was a matter of great interest. Throughout the world that day Italians who believed in a United Italy came together. They recalled the hopes of this man who, with all his devotion to his country, was still more devoted to humanity and who dedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an appeal so philosophical, so filled with a yearning for righteousness, that it transcended all national boundaries and became a bugle call for "The Duties of Man.""

"Mazzini despised the compromises of the "whigs" and would have no truck with the diplomacy of a Cavour. Yet he came to admit that the programme of insurrections upon which he built his faith implied the sacrifice of a generation. Disdaining immediate objects, reaching far into the future—working for all or nothing—he pointed to the reward that would be enjoyed not by his contemporaries, not by their children perhaps, but at least (let us say) by their grandchildren. Unfortunately, at this very point—in the passage from one generation to another—history seems in a particular way to intervene and to deflect the results of human endeavour; so that we may doubt whether this attempt to overreach Time itself is the proper kind of far-sightedness to have in politics. Apart from new factors that may change the course of the story, there is a process which may give efficacy to the ideas of a Mazzini precisely in so far as these ideas can be made to serve the cause of power; and it is not entirely irrelevant that though Mazzini was no Fascist he did attack the individualism of 1789, and he taught young men to sink themselves—to intoxicate themselves—in the Organic People. One of the things that may happen therefore in the transition to a new generation is the possibility that Mazzini's whole doctrine—and his glorification of nationality—when mixed with a little earth and entangled in a world of tricks and chances, will form but the raw material for the next Mussolini that may arise."

"I have the duty before the conscience of my country and to defend the vitality of my people to speak as an Italian, but I feel the responsibility and the right to speak also as an anti-fascist democrat, as a representative of the new Republic that, harmonising in itself the humanitarian aspirations of Giuseppe Mazzini ([an Italian 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason]), the universalist conceptions of Christianity and the internationalist hopes of the workers, is all directed towards that lasting and reconstructive peace that you seek and towards that cooperation between peoples that you have the task of establishing."

"I doubt whether any man of his generation exercised so profound an influence on the destinies of Europe as did Mazzini. The map of Europe as we see it to-day is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality, but free nationality based on right, based above all on duty—the rights and duties of individuals, the rights and duties of races, the rights and duties and ideals of humanity."

"The liberation movements of the last eighty years, not merely in Italy, but throughout Europe, were inspired by his fervent teaching. It was the thrill which came from his words that gave nerve and power and courage and daring to the men who were struggling for the emancipation of the oppressed nationalities of Europe. He said in one of his books, "We are on the threshold of a great age, the age of the peoples." His doctrines, his ideals, his example, fired the hearts that led the peoples across the threshold into the new age. Italy has crossed it; the oppressed nations of Turkey have been emancipated; the oppressed races of Austria and Russia, and let me frankly add, Ireland, have gained by the doctrines of Joseph Mazzini. The glittering Imperial fabric reared by Bismarck is humbled in the dust, but the dreams of this young man, who came over as an exile to England and lived in poverty here for years, dependent on the charity of friends, and armed only with a pen, have now become startling realities throughout the whole Continent. Here, after he has been lying for fifty years in the soil he loved so well, we find in the reconstruction of Europe the great principles of Mazzini—the emancipation of races on the basis of freedom—converted into a treaty and into action. He taught not merely the rights of a nation; he taught the rights of other nations; not merely the right of your own nation to be free, but the right of the next nation to be equally free. We have learned half the lesson of Mazzini, and whether this age is the "Golden Age" predicted by Mazzini depends entirely upon the extent to which we learn the other half of his lesson."

"His was an age of fierce hatreds. I wish I could say this was not an age of fierce hatreds also. Mazzini said you can build nothing that lasts upon hate. Hate, he said, will destroy ultimately the very thing that you love. Mazzini said: "I want free nations; I want a Europe of free nations; but I do not want a Europe of free nations hating each other; I want a Europe of free nations that will be a brotherhood of peoples." He is the father of the idea of the League of Nations."

"There are men who blame Mazzini for the present position of things. He is not responsible for the frenzied nationalism which is the peril of to-day, the extravagant nationalism, the nationalism which has no respect for the rights of others. Mazzini never taught that. His career was an embodiment and a symbol of the good feeling and good understanding that exists between British and Italian democracies. He called this his "second country." Here he found refuge, protection, encouragement, support, friendship."

"Lost golden ages can be a very effective tool for motivating people in the present. “Unity was and is the destiny of Italy,” Giuseppe Mazzini, the great nineteenth- century Italian nationalist, urged the divided peninsula. “The civil primacy, twice exercised by Italy—through the arms of the Caesars and the voice of the Popes—is destined to be held a third time by the people of Italy— the nation.” Mazzini was also a liberal who believed that a world filled by self-governing peoples would be a happy, democratic, and peaceful one yet there was an ominous tone to his exhortations: “They who were unable forty years ago to perceive the signs of progress toward unity made in the successive periods of Italian life, were simply blind to the light of History. But should any, in the lace of the actual glorious manifestation of our people, endeavour to lead them back to ideas of confederations, and independent provincial liberty, they would deserve to be branded as traitors to their country.” A great past can be a promise, but it can also be a terrible burden. Mussolini promised the Italians a second Roman Empire and led them to disaster in World War II."

"We who have seen Italia in the throes, Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now, Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough, All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those Who blew the breath of life into her frame: Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three: Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim."

"Of Mazzini we may truly say what he said himself of Father Paul, the historian of the Council of Trent, that he was two distinct beings. He was sower of the seed, the indefatigable organiser, the conspirator, on behalf of the idea that he had invented and brought to life, of United Italy. Besides his ceaseless industry in this vexed sphere of action, his was the moral genius that spiritualised politics, and gave a new soul to public duty in citizens and nations. As practical statesman, when we have applauded him for the exalting political conception which his energy, ardour, and fire forced upon Italy and Europe, we have perhaps said all."

"[H]e stood for the voice of conscience in modern democracy. Of all the democratic gospellers of that epoch between 1848 and 1870...it was Mazzini who went nearest to the heart and true significance of democracy. He had a moral glow, and the light of large historic and literary comprehension, that stretched it into the foremost place in the minds of men with social imagination enough to look for new ideals, and courage enough to resist the sluggard's dread of new illusions. He pressed his finger on the People's intellectual pulse and warned them against the feverish beats that came from words and phrases passed off as ideas, or, still more dangerous, from fragments of an idea treated as if they were the idea whole. He warned them that human history is not a thing of disconnected fragments, and that recollection of great moves and great men in the past is needed to keep us safe on the heights of future and present. He did more; though figuring as restorer of a single nation, he was as earnest as Kant himself in urging the moral relations between different States, and the supremacy and overlordship of cosmopolitan humanity."

"I realized that if my friends and followers were to read Mazzini’s articles that will increase their faith in our methods enormously. In 1906, I and my colleagues in Abhinav Bharat were hardly twenty to twenty-two years of age. Our leaders, both Moderates and Militants dismissed our activities as ‘childish’. They were the leaders of our society at that time. But then Mazzini and his fellow revolutionaries were similarly ridiculed as ‘childish’ and ‘absurd’ by contemporary elders in Italian society in 1830s. Mazzini had replied to such ridicule in his articles. The funny thing was that in 1906 persons like Mazzini and Garibaldi were regarded as ‘great patriots’ by Indian leaders without realizing that in their days Mazzini and Garibaldi too were being branded as ‘foolhardy’ and ‘childish’. Mazzini’s articles were going to make firm our plans of action and induce faith among people of India in our methods."

"Italy would remember for ever the wonderful hospitality accorded by the English people to the great Italian exiles who had been the principal actors in the drama of their long national struggle towards freedom and unity. Mazzini's teaching was never more applicable than in these critical days when Europe was still suffering from the consequences of the Great War and was desperately striving to find its moral, political, and economic equilibrium, and to restart towards a reconstruction, not only of its shaken financial resources, but of its fundamental spirit of peace. He was proud and happy to affirm that both their countries, in close connexion with their Allies, were determined to try to accomplish that moral and economic settlement of Europe towards which the teachings of Mazzini pointed with the religious fervour of an apostle and a prophet."

"Perhaps of all men who have ever borne a great part in politics Mazzini was most entirely patriot. Through forty years of incessant thought, teaching, and action, in hiding or at the head of a revolutionary government, an idol or a denounced fugitive, in all countries and by all roads he pressed forward towards the same object, the transfer of Italy, once more united, from its foreign or semi-foreign despots to the sway of a freely elected Sovereign Assembly, which, as he trusted or believed, would be guided by something difficult to distinguish from direct inspiration from above. That he changed his means frequently is true, and that he sometimes subordinated means to ends can hardly be denied, for he was that rare character, a practical ideologue."

"In truth, he was neither anarchist nor Jacobin, nor even Revolutionist, but a calm and serene teacher and leader, a prophet possessed with a faith and absorbed in an object, who swayed men by the force of his ideas, the holiness of his life, and the unique loftiness of his character steadily onward towards an end which was not always theirs... This influence, rising in some cases to an ascendancy such as has hardly been given to the greatest religious teachers, was employed unswervingly for his single end, and it was employed successfully. Cavour made Italy, but it was due to Mazzini, and not to Cavour, that such making was possible."

"The idea of the powerless lawyer had penetrated an entire people, and Italy stood up unfettered and alive. In modern history no man armed only with spiritual weapons, strong only in his cause, his genius, and his character, has ever performed such a feat, or made so deep a personal impression on the history of mankind... It is among the greater Popes that we must seek for the analogue of Joseph Mazzini, the serene man possessed of and by a faith, who could use all weapons, and mould all men, and disregard all circumstances; whose gentleness was as inflexible as other men’s obstinacy; to whom earthly temptations had no meaning and earthly scruples no force; who could not pause, or change, or tremble, and who therefore at once achieved the lofty success and roused the undying hatreds which attend the course of the man who lives for an idea. Unstirred by the ordinary ambitions of men and unaffected by their ordinary passions, an ascetic by habit rather than conviction, incapable of envy as of doubt, irresistible in his power over hearts, which he used only to further his great cause; personally as gentle as a woman, but for his ideas implacable as a statue; eloquent with the eloquence which can persuade an individual or a Senate, yet averse to life in public; never induced even by his own genius to swerve for a moment from his appointed course; an immovable fanatic, with all the knowledge and all the tact of a finished grandee, Joseph Mazzini was what in the Roman Catholic ideal every Pope should be."

"It is as plain now that Mazzini was the greatest moral force in Europe during the nineteenth century... We must go back to Dante to find an Italian who had, like Mazzini, the combination of vivid practical intellect with a highly sensitive, even mystical, spirituality... As Dante spoke for the medieval world, so Mazzini is thus far Europe's most authentic spokesman of the ideals and hopes of our new epoch."

"We have to announce to-day the death of a man who in his time has played a most singular part upon the theatre of European politics; one whose name has for years been regarded as the symbol of Revolution, or rather of Republicanism; one in whose personal character there were many fine and noble qualities; but still a man who was feared even more widely than he was loved, and one whose departure from the scene of action, to say the least, will be no unwelcome news to several crowned and discrowned members of the family of European Sovereigns. He was the man who ever "troubled Israel" by his ceaseless efforts in the cause of Republicanism, and now at length he is at rest."

"In our own day classics have been dethroned without being replaced. But throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our statesmen were so brought up that they thought of Rome as the hearth of their political civilization, where their predecessor Cicero had denounced Catiline; where the models of their own eloquence and statecraft, as taught them at Eton, Harrow and Winchester, had been practised and brought to perfection. And, therefore, the ruins of the Forum were as familiar, as sacred, and as moving to Russell and to Gladstone as to Mazzini and Garibaldi themselves. This was a prime fact in the history of the Risorgimento."

"He does not exalt the individual at the expense of the nation, like the disciples of Rousseau; nor the nation at the expense of the individual, as was the tendency of Hegel; nor humanity at the expense of both, as was the incurable aberration of Comte. Recognising that each of these has its peculiar function, he recognises no less fully that no one of them can put forth its energies without the others; that each of them is conditioned absolutely by the others; and that only to the most limited extent is it possible to mark off the sphere in which each operates even in partial independence of the others."

"Now it can hardly be doubted that the earliest writer to give its due place to nationality was Mazzini. He felt, as few men have felt, the force of the popular sentiment in this matter. He was alive also to its limitations. To him the nation is not, as it is to many, an end in itself. It is strictly a link in the chain between the individual on the one side and humanity on the other. He recognises, as no previous writer had done, what may be called the personality of the nation. He proclaims its right, or rather its obligation, both to defend itself against all encroachment, whether material or moral, from without, and to develop its inborn faculties to the highest possible pitch from within. He thus gives satisfaction to all that is either valid or worth having in the claims of nationality. At the same time, he marks out the limits beyond which the instinct of nationality becomes dangerous, or even harmful. He denies that it is a final and absolute principle. He persistently subordinates it to the larger claims of humanity. This at once bars out the possibility of any right to aggression as between one nation and another. It subjects all nations alike to the common ties which bind the members of one brotherhood, mankind. By the same stroke, Mazzini gives the only valid sanction to the real rights of nationality. He declares the free development of the national spirit to be essential to the true life of humanity. So far as it serves that end, it is nothing but good. As soon as it throws itself athwart that end, it becomes an enormous evil."

"I am very much moved, sir, to be in the presence of this monument. On the other side of the water we have studied the life of Mazzini with almost as much pride as if we shared in the glory of his history, and I am very glad to acknowledge that his spirit has been handed down to us of a later generation on both sides of the water. It is delightful to me to feel that I am taking some small part in accomplishing the realization of the ideals to which his life and thought were devoted. It is with a spirit of veneration, sir, and with a spirit I hope of emulation, that I stand in the presence of this monument and bring my greetings and the greetings of America with our homage to the great Mazzini."

"In a way it seems natural for an American to be a citizen of Genoa, and I shall always count it among the most delightful associations of my life that you should have conferred this honor upon me, and in taking away this beautiful edition of the works of Mazzini I hope that I shall derive inspiration from these volumes, as I have already derived guidance from the principles which Mazzini so eloquently expressed. It is very inspiring, sir, to feel how the human spirit is refreshed again and again from its original sources. It is delightful to feel how the voice of one people speaks to another through the mouth of men who have by some gift of God been lifted above the common level and seen the light of humanity, and therefore these words of your prophet and leader will, I hope, be deeply planted in the hearts of my fellow countrymen."

"[ ... ] The First World War had to be fought in order to allow the “Illuminati” to overthrow the power of the tsars in Russia and transform this country into the stronghold of atheistic communism. The differences stirred up by the agents of the “Illuminati” between the British and German empires were used to foment this war. After the war ended, communism had to be built up and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions."

"I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read."

"We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function."

"A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading."

"reading is at the beginning of the social contract"

"I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords."

"A book brings its own history to the reader."

"I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometric progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before."

"Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?"

"Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature."

"The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing."

"In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication."

"Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters."

"Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation."

"At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape."

"In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form."

"Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen."

"One can transform a place by reading in it."

"To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft."

"From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis."

"Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion."

"Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being."

"The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users."

"I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia."

"Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past."

"The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more."

"It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth."

"As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier."

"As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope."

"Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible."

"Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd."

"The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A."

"Every text assumes a reader."

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality."

"True influence consists in surpassing one's model not in reproducing it."

"The pleasure of their (the Imagist poetry is not the satisfaction of discovering little by little , but of seizing at a single blow, in the fullest vitality, the image, a fusion of reality in words."

"Between the image of the Imagist and the 'symbol' of the Symbolists there is a difference only of precision'"

"The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations … often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation."

"The individual who is subordinate to an objective law feels himself determined by it, while he, in turn, in no way determines the law, and has no possibility of reacting to it in a manner which could influence it&mdash;quite in contrast to even the most miserable slave, who, in some fashion at last, can still in this sense react to his master."

"The social game has a deeper double meaning&mdash;that it is played not only in a society as its outward bearer but that with its help people actually "play" "society.""

"I understand the task of sociology to be description and determination of the historical-psychological origin of those forms in which interactions take place between human beings. The totality of these interactions, springing from the most diverse impulses, directed toward the most diverse objects, and aiming at the most diverse ends, constitutes "society.""

"When one says, for example, that superiority and inferiority is a formation to be found in every human association, though the proposition certainly involves very profound insight into the essence of human nature and human relationship, yet the assertion is so general that it affords little knowledge of particular societary formations. In order to reach such particular knowledge we must study separate types of superiority and inferiority, and we must master the special features of their formation, which in proportion to their definiteness of course lose generality of application."

"Every social occurrence as such, consists of an interaction between individuals. In other words, each individual is at the same time an active and a passive agent in a transaction. In case of superiority and inferiority, however, the relation assumes the appearance of a one-sided operation ; the one party appears to exert, while the other seems merely to receive an influence."

"Die tiefsten Probleme des modernen Lebens quellen aus dem Anspruch des Individuums, die Selbständigkeit und Eigenart seines Daseins gegen die Übermächte der Gesellschaft, des geschichtlich Ererbten, der äußerlichen Kultur und Technik des Lebens zu bewahren - die letzterreichte Umgestaltung des Kampfes mit der Natur, den der primitive Mensch um seine leibliche Existenz zu führen hat."

"Mag das 18.Jahrhundert zur Befreiung von allen historisch erwachsenen Bindungen in Staat und Religion, in Moral und Wirtschaft aufrufen, damit die ursprünglich gute Natur, die in allen Menschen die gleiche ist, sich ungehemmt entwickele; mag das 19.Jahrhundert neben der bloßen Freiheit die arbeitsteilige Besonderheit des Menschen und seiner Leistung fordern, die den Einzelnen unvergleichlich und möglichst unentbehrlich macht, ihn dadurch aber um so enger auf die Ergänzung durch alle anderen anweist; mag Nietzsche in dem rücksichtslosesten Kampf der Einzelnen oder der Sozialismus gerade in dem Niederhalten aller Konkurrenz die Bedingung für die volle Entwicklung der Individuen sehen - in alledem wirkt das gleiche Grundmotiv: der Widerstand des Subjekts, in einem gesellschaftlich-technischen Mechanismus nivelliert und verbraucht zu werden."

"Wo die Produkte des spezifisch modernen Lebens nach ihrer Innerlichkeit gefragt werden, sozusagen der Körper der Kultur nach seiner Seele - wie mir dies heut gegenüber unseren Großstädten obliegt - wird die Antwort der Gleichung nachforschen müssen, die solche Gebilde zwischen den individuellen und den überindividuellen Inhalten des Lebens stiften, den Anpassungen der Persönlichkeit, durch die sie sich mit den ihr äußeren Mächten abfindet."

"Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones."

"Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services."

"The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit.""

"The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. It needs merely to be pointed out that the metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact."

"Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover."

"All relationships of people to each other rest, as a matter of course, upon the precondition that they know something about each other. The merchant knows that his correspondent wants to buy at the lowest price and to sell at the highest price. The teacher knows that he may credit to the pupil a certain quality and quantity of information. Within each social stratum the individual knows approximately what measure of culture he has to presuppose in each other individual."

"Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it. Even when one of the parties does not notice the secret factor, yet the attitude of the concealer, and consequently the whole relationship, will be modified by it."

"In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that "error is life and knowledge is death," because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish."

"If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics."

"Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement."

"Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given."

"Der Fremde ist uns nah, insofern wir Gleichheiten nationaler oder sozialer, berufsmäßiger oder allgemein menschlicher Art zwischen ihm und uns fühlen; er ist uns fern, insofern diese Gleichheiten über ihn und uns hinausreichen und uns beide nur verbinden, weil sie überhaupt sehr Viele verbinden."

"Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and behavior he finds himself at every moment between two boundaries. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled always with different contents in life's diverse provinces, activities, and destinies. We feel that the content and value of every hour stands between a higher and a lower; every thought between a wiser and a more foolish; every possession between a more extended and a more limited; every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy, and morality."

"Man is something that is to be overcome. Logically considered, this, too, presents a contradiction: he who overcomes himself is admittedly the victor, but he is also the defeated. The ego succumbs to itself, when it wins; it achieves victory, when it suffers defeat. Yet the contradiction only arises when the two aspects of this unity are hardened into opposed, mutually exclusive conceptions. It is precisely the fully unified process of the moral life which overcomes and surpasses every lower state by achieving a higher one, and again transcends this latter state through one still higher. That man overcomes himself means that he reaches out beyond the bounds that the moment sets for him. There must be something at hand to be overcome, but it is only there in order to be overcome. Thus even as an ethical agent, man is the limited being that has no limit."

"One of the first theorists to acknowledge the deep and important impact of urbanization on social life was the German scholar, Georg Simmel. Simmel developed a sociology that focused on the special ways that forms, such as the number of people in groups, influenced social life. His effort to understand the nature of urbanization and, in particular, the metropolis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, displayed his characteristic method of analysis."

"A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country."

"If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away."

"I was brought up in a house where there was a great deal of silence."

"I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure."

"The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych.""

"I was the worst barman who ever lived. My pints of Guinness were unholy."

"I have a rule that I don't drink in New York because I don't want to wake up with a hangover and not be able to work."

"When I was a professor at the University of Austin in Texas, it had such a luxurious swimming–pool that one end had a raised ledge in the water specifically so you could drag a deckchair in and lie on it and read. But the problem is that the students are all so young and the thing with Americans is that when they're fit, they are so fit. So you feel like someone's granny pottering about in the slow lane."

"I went to a friend who's a girl and asked her, 'What's it like to have sex for the first time, if you're Irish – so you're modest, and it's the 1950s – so you've never seen it in a film?' I listened carefully to what she said, and I put it in the book. It was an important element, the detail was richly memorable for the person, it had to be in the book."

"Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them . . . a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 -- if one of them had . . . yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem."

"The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up."

"Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly."

"All poetry is an affair of the body, that is, to be real, it must affect the body."

"We write as we feel, as we think, with our entire body."

"Literary style is the product of the toal phyisology."

"Grace from on high so opportunely purifies the petty human passions."

"Innocence has its instincts, its needs, its physiological dues."

"Time does not live for them, they (girls) live in the absolute. A curious creature. But then all women are curious creatures, girls above all."

"Women are complex, of course not more so than men, but in a different way that men cannot understand."

"Women don't understand themselves and what is more they do not care about understanding."

"Women feel and it suffices to steer them satisfactorily through life as well as to solve problems which leave men utterly helpless. It is only through feelings one can get in contact with them. There is but one way of understanding women and that is to love them."

"Women live entirely in the present, men much more in the future where nature is less well organized."

"Making mental sermons, can spoil delicious moments."

"The decisive gestures in life are almost always the simplest, the most ingenuous."

"Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand. In both sexes there are two successive crises, the sexual and the sensual. The first comes at a fixed period … the second generally coincides with the completion of growth. Sometimes, when decline is beginning, a third occurs, which like the first brings with it a condition of sentimentality."

"Art must break the chains, all rules and formulas."

"Every child, at birth, is the Universal Man. But, as it grows, we turn it into "a petty man." It should be the function of education to turn it again into the original "Universal Man." The child which by birth was the universal man is fettered by us with such constraints as country, language, religion, caste, race and colour. To free it from all these limitations and transform it into "the enlightened soul", that is to say, the universal man, — this should become the first and foremost function of our education, culture, civilization, and what not."

"When I hear Kannada, my heart leaps up and I am all ears."

"It is not correct to say that Valmiki is the only Ramayana poet. There are thousands of Ramayana poets. There is a Ramayana poet in every village."

"Victory to you Mother Karnataka, The daughter of Mother India! Hail the land of beautiful rivers and forests! Hail the abode of saints and seers!"

"A new jewel in the crown of Goddess Earth, You are a trove of sandalwood, beauty and gold. Victory to you Mother Karnataka, the daughter of Mother India, where Rama and Krishna had their incarnations."

"Garden of peace for all communities, A sight that allures the connoisseurs, A garden where Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Parsis and the Jains (can grow together); The site where many kings like Janaka ruled; A haven for singers and musicians; The body of the children of Mother Kannada; The house where the Kannada Tongue plays in joy."

"Be unhoused, O my soul! Only the Infinite be your goal. Leave those myriad forms behind, Leave the million names that bind. A flash will pierce your heart and mind, And unhouse you, O my soul!"

"Winnow the chaff of a hundred creeds Beyond these systems, hollow as reeds, Turn unhorizened to where Truth leads, To be unhoused, O my soul!"

"The infinite Yoga knows no end, Endless the quest you apprehend. You'll grow infinite and ascend, When you are unhoused, O my soul!"

"In me is the sky, in me lies the earth."

"Amidst the early morning dew Walking across the greenery And in the evening that is scary While taking a breath, Oh, flower, I listen to your song, Oh flower, I defeat your love."

"When Manmatha kissed Rati, blood from her lips may have spilt on earth and blossomed into rose on the plant and kisses the viewer's eyes with its beauty now!"

"It was a day of blackest deed When Delhi streets of fame Did glitter well by cursed greed Of harsh Timoor the lame."

"Inspired by neo-Vedanta, Kuvempu considered the Vedas and Upanishads as India’s common spiritual heritage, not texts of Brahminical orthodoxy. A famous poem of Kuvempu, "Aniketana", asks that our consciousness not be bounded by the identities of caste, religion, gender, and even language, since they lessen our experience in the world. He wished that we aspire to become vishvamanava (universal human)."

"Kuvempu never visited temples, but believed in the presence of creator in each creature. In fact, whenever Kuvempu was not writing or teaching, he meditated. To him, worshipping nature was a path to attain Aadhyatma or The Supreme Soul."

"Many don't know Kuvempu wrote poems in English as early as 1922, bringing out a collection of seven poems titled Beginner's muse! In 1924, when Kuvempu got introduced to the Irish poet James Cousins through Dr M H Krishnamachar, he suggested to Kuvempu that he should write only in Kannada. Though he was initially disheartened by Cousin's advice, he later realised his full potential as a poet and a multi-faceted writer in the richness of Kannada."

"It should be clear by now that there are people who can, in fact, be reasonably considered experts; that it is rational to rely, within limits, on expert opinion; and that it is possible, by exercising relatively simple criteria, to gain insight into whether a particular expert is reliable or not. It is also true that experts, of course, do make mistakes, and that even the agreement of a large majority of experts in a field does not guarantee that they got it right. That’s the nature of scientific truth, as we have seen throughout this book: it is tentative, because it is the result of a human endeavor that is limited both by the type and amount of available evidence and by humans’ finite mental powers and emotional reactions. But the examples above show how you can, with a little bit of practice, tell science from bunk!"

"Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game."

"...If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you... God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience... so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge. This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries..."

"Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting."

"...Do not think the war that we are waging is the Islamic State’s war alone. Rather, it is the Muslims’ war altogether. It is the war of every Muslim in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war. It is but the war of the people of faith against the people of disbelief..."

"...[Be] certain that our hearts are broken on account of your leaving of your homes and your lands, and your seeking of shelter in the territory of the Rāfidah [those who reject Islamic authority] and the Kurdish atheists, and your being forced to wander the lands... So return to your lands, and remain in your homes, and seek shelter – after first seeking shelter with Allah – with your people in the Islamic State, for you will find therein, by Allah’s permission, a warm embrace and a safe refuge. For you are our people. We defend you, your honor, and your wealth. We want you to be mighty and noble, we want you to be safe and secure..."

"...By Allah, we will take revenge! By Allah, we will take revenge! Even if it takes a while, we will take revenge, and every amount of harm against the Ummah will be responded to with multitudes more against the perpetrator..."

"...Soon, by Allah's permission, a day will come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as master, having honor, being revered, with his head held high, and his dignity preserved. Anyone who dares to offend him will be disciplined, and any hand that reaches out to harm him will be cut off. So let the world know that we are living today in a new era. Whoever was heedless must now be alert. Whoever was sleeping must now awaken..."

"...Crusaders and Jews don’t dare come on the ground because they were defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan..."

"...Jews, soon you shall hear from us in Palestine, which will become your grave..."

"America, which presents itself as the only superpower, is losing its status as the world’s top leader and is becoming an exhausted country with huge debts. This is preparing the ground for its collapse and the fall of other countries into the abyss."

"Fight them and ambush them everywhere, increase the attacks against them. Target the infidels’ information and media centers and their psychological warfare centers ... Continue your actions ... Ensure that the Crusaders [i.e. Westerners] and those who have abandoned Islam do not enjoy a peaceful life in their homes while your brothers are suffering from bombing, killing, and destruction."

"For the Mujahideen the scale of victory or defeat is not dependant on a city or town being stolen or subject to that who has aerial superiority, intercontinental missiles or smart bombs... Oh Caliphate soldiers ... Trust in God’s promise and His victory ... For with hardship comes relief and a way out."

"A bullet fired, stabbing, detonation of an IED in your country, are tantamount to a thousand attacks here [in Syria and Iraq], and don’t neglect [also] the ramming attacks on the roads."

"Allah loves those who worship Him to become shaheeds, whose blood is spilled out of love for Him."

"You have no alternative, and if you wish to live in honor, then this can be accomplished only by returning to your religion to religion and to jihad against your enemies."

"God's enemies from the Jews, Christians, atheists, Shiites, apostates and all of the world's infidels have dedicated their media, money, army and munitions to fight Muslims and jihadists in the State of Nineveh after they witnessed it become one of the bases of Islam and one of its minarets under the Caliphate."

"...I was with Baghdadi at the Islamic University. We studied the same course, but he wasn't a friend. He was quiet, and retiring. He spent time alone. Later, when he helped found the Islamic Army, Mr Dabash fought alongside militia leaders who were committing some of the worst excesses in violence and would later form al-Qaeda... [but] Baghdadi was not one of them, I used to know all the leaders (of the insurgency) personally. Zarqawi (the former leader of al-Qaeda) was closer than a brother to me... But I didn't know Baghdadi. He was insignificant. He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him..."

"In August 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi from Samarra, sent a scouting mission of seven or eight men from Iraq into Syria to assess how ripe the country was for his ambitions. Baghdadi was taking Zarqawi’s dream of establishing an Islamic state to another level. His men found a country much like Iraq in the years after the US invasion: outside the large cities, men with guns roamed freely, state institutions were weak, and—most conveniently—Assad had released scores of Islamists from his jails, just as Saddam Hussein had done before the US invasion of 2003. This was a classic move: the dictator appears to show magnanimity at a time of unrest and declares an amnesty for prisoners, but alongside the intellectuals and activists, he releases into the wild those who will inflict chaos, so he can be called upon as the best option to bring peace. In Syria, some of the men released had fought in Iraq, groomed by Assad himself to make life miserable for the Americans in Iraq. Assad would jail the fighters as soon as they returned, letting them rot in prison until he next needed them. As he set them loose in 2011, he deviously warned the international community that the protesters were religious extremists, making him the architect of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. Baghdadi’s men traveled west from Iraq into Syria, on desert highways and along rivers, a well-traveled road used by fighters who had gone in the opposite direction to join the insurgency in Iraq. In Syria, courtesy of Assad, they found a ready network of Salafist jihadists they could tap into to serve Baghdadi’s grand designs of a borderless Islamic state. But without a revolution for freedom, there would have been no such opportunity."

"...I bear witness by God - and there is no other deity except Him - to what I know from familiarity with this imposter who has called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as he had studied under me with a group of the erudite ones...in the year 2005, then the study was cut off because of my arrest, and I had got to know him very well. He was of limited intelligence, slow to understand, pale in intuitive grasp. For he is not from among the average students of Islamic knowledge ['ilm], and his studies background are academic studies in the government universities, whose standard is emaciated and which have no relation with forming a student of knowledge, let alone a knowledgeable person [referring to Baghdadi's time at the Islamic University of Baghdad]."

"...So, is “Caliph Ibrahim” of the Islamic State an extremist, a militant, a terrorist or an Islamic fighter? None of the above. All those labels imply behavior that makes some sort of sense in terms of human reality and normal ideologies..."

"...We have endured a lot of harm from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his brothers, and we preferred to respond with as little as possible, out of our concern to extinguish the fire of sedition. But Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his brothers did not leave us a choice, for they have demanded that all the mujahideen reject their confirmed pledges of allegiance, and to pledge allegiance to them for what they claim of a caliphate..."

"The beat must not be like a tyrannical hammer, impeding or urging on, but must be to the music what the pulse-beat is to the life of man. There is no slow tempo in which passages do not occur that demand a quicker motion, so as to obviate the impression of dragging. Conversely there is no presto that does not need a quiet delivery by many places, so as not to throw away the chance of expressiveness by hurrying... Neither the quickening nor the slowing of the tempo should ever give the impression of the spasmodic or the violent. The changes, to have a musical-poetic significance, must come in an orderly way in periods and phrases, conditioned by the varying warmth of the expression. We have in music no signs for all this. They exist only in the sentient soul. If they are not there, then there is no help to be had from the metronome – which obviates only the grosser errors – nor from these extremely imperfect precepts of mine."

"'I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I'm writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously."

"It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea."

"There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore."

"I lie back. They've "refurbished" the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say "furnished"), and don't say it without irony."

"The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free - not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it's gazing upon something it's unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing. Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted."

"Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which you push a window open was now unnecessary. ... It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry."

"I ... take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife."

"I'm undecided about the time we live in. This ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there's the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you'd never see again."

"Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life."

"Mahadev Govind Ranade. Leaving aside his air of self-importance, he looks marginally foreign, as all statues do."

"This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour."

"He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to."

"History is always lying before you, unnoticed: till you suddenly see it, as we do now."

"I love churches in Bombay...they make me think of shadow. Of footfall on stone. In England, churches preside over their habitat till they're gratuitous."

"Each view has a history. You sense you're where others have been."

"At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary."

"Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end."

"I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning."

"... "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these."

"Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us."

"An hour's a symbolic duration."

"Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily."

"The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like."

"History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book."

"Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too."

"The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world."

"‘Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.’"

"‘Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime ...’"

"‘... I sensed that Park Street is, essentially (even for the destitute), a place of brief acquaintances and meetings no one has too much time for anyone else, you yourself are part of a web of motivations that are fading and resurrecting – and you must be on the move constantly to be in the street’s ebb and flow of traffic.’"

"‘This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.’"

"‘Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.’"

"‘All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.’"

"‘Shaped by student life in England, my wife and I are aghast at this frenetic sociability before the new weeks begins, this almost philistine uncaringness for the idea of Monday morning.’"

"(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare’; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.’"

"‘The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.’"

"‘The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. ... The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.’"

"‘... the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.’"

"‘Writers don’t so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it’s an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room ... And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments ... but the houses and lanes in which people live.’"

"‘... the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.’"

"Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously."

"‘The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.’"

"‘And his talent became a problematic responsibility he did not know what to do with; it was as if, having given so much to his gift – hard work, practice – he wanted something in return; and not having got that “something”, whatever it might be, he had decided to punish both himself and everyone around him.’"

"‘Motilalji began to hum with a sour expression on his face, as if he was never on holiday from his talent and vocation, and resented the fact ...’"

"‘... he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.’"

"‘... a severe woman with a patient but unprevaricating gaze, who turned out to be Indira Gandhi.’"

"‘Gulp by gulp, in the air-conditioned study, he swallowed civilisation.’"

"‘Internationalism’ is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership ...’"

"‘By the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of light and space as both metaphors or, and habitations for, the human self, or “the substance called the mind”, is absolute, especially with Tagore, who, in a letter in 1894 to his niece, would demand, not political freedom ... but “more light, more space”.’"

"‘The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children’s literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children’s literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high’ literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction.’"

"‘... the history of the “secular” as a cultural, humane, interstitial space in the midst of logos itself, has lost out to the idea of the “secular” as a fundamental manifestation of the rationality of the nation-state, just as the histories of modernity and cosmopolitanism in India have been subsumed, in our time, and for a variety of reasons, by a history of the nation.’"

"‘where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom’ ( St Cyril Road, Bombay )"

"‘I drifted past heliotropic rubbish-heaps, elderly/white houses.’ ( The Bandra Medical Store )"

"‘Never to have lived is best. And the second best/is to grow old with the morning into/afternoon, and then to evening, when sundry shadows and gestures marry/like the vanished divisions of a shut fan.’ ( St Cyril Road Sequence )"

"‘Light shafted obliquely on it.’ ( The Steamer )"

"‘To the far left, above your shoulder’s gentle/curve, like golden pods, the sodium vapour/lights in the naval dockyard ... And before us,/a continuous, unreal flare of fire defined/the horizon’s extremity, a stain on a brow.’ ( The Steamer )"

"‘As the sun came up, we/saw the leaves peer out, shivering.’ ( Letter from the Hills )"

"‘a speck of dust hanging/in a vertical wall of light.’ ( Letter from the Hills )"

"‘And the old homelovingness/of light falling and touching the black/utensils ...’ ( Kitchen )"

"In the oldest, bunched houses with tottering stairs,"

"These small freshwater fish"

"‘... what I’ve tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate ... consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.’"

"‘I’m uncomfortable beginning at the beginning. It’s not because I’m clever, but because it’s a difficult thing, writing.’"

"‘This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.’"

"‘... the menu’s a delirious poem/on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi/"

"It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains"

"‘This morning he’d discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight.’"

"There was a difference between his parents with regard to appliances; his father distrusted them as he would a rival; his mother had no confidence in using them, but none the less desired them."

"... the cleverest way of battling the heat was not moving."

"There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims."

"The city was still .... Soon the machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone’s hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret."

"There was a special purpose in these throws, for the readers of Ganashakti were fellow-travellers of the Communist party, they believed in its necessity and vision, and an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house."

"Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. ... In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion – both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried – a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter."

"When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes ... hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming."

"Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling."

"... my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection."

"The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely."

"At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star."

"While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings."

"Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee’s voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe."

"Her hair is troublesome and curly ... It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, hat gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note."

"Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason."

"Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look."

"The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food."

"On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep’s mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crab-like postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer."

"Abhi, Babla and Sandeep slept like primeval creatures huddled on the island of the bed, close to the horizon, outwaiting the dawn that would bring the first thought to their heads. Their bodies slept with a pure detached love for every moment of sleep."

"The gutters in the lane overflowed with an odd, languid grace. Water filled the lane; rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep. Insects swam in circles. Urchins splashed about haphazardly, while Saraswati returned from market with a shopping-bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island."

"She would sweep the floor – unending expanses, acres and acres of floor – with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird."

"It seemed there was no democracy among children – always an aristocracy based on strength, intellect and seniority. But seniority counted most, because a boy of ten is bound to be stronger and cleverer than a boy of nine, having spent an extra year in the world, at a time when each year is like a precious deposit in a newly opened bank account. Among boys of the same age, there would be a silent tussle, a clean, honourable contest. Once a leader emerged, however, no elections were held."

"... the floor was a stone slab of coolness, an expanse of warm ice that would not melt."

"There has been writing for 10 days now"

"‘... this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.’"

"‘Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. ... by ‘modernity’ I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. ... if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new – that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I’m not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta’s alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It’s this quality I’m trying to get at when I speak of modernity. ... modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature – in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself.’"

"‘... invisibility was one of Bengali modernity’s prerequisites and cardinal achievements.’"

"…There are many ways of defining the modern but one is to say that an urban space, a man-made space, has some of the energy, wildness, unpredictability and randomness that we usually associate with nature. In another age, somebody might speak with the same kind of excitement about nature as the modernist does about the city…"

"People are much more aware of one another in England, super-aware. They are focused on others in a seemingly detached and abstract way. This was very different from India. In India you could do anything and people would see you but not see you, hear you but not hear you."

"It does like writers, but it's also Calcutta now, not the Calcutta of 25 or 30 or 100 years ago. They maybe haven't got over the idea of it, but the reality, the context that produced that, has disappeared."

"It's a very strange middle class…Full of operators and people on the move. It really doesn't value disruptions in that activeness. It doesn't have time for any privileging of daydreaming."

"The roots of “Vedic science” can be traced to the so-called Bengal Renaissance, which in turn was deeply influenced by the Orientalist constructions of Vedic antiquity as the “Golden Age” of Hinduism. Heavily influenced by German idealism and British romanticism, important Orientalists including H.T. Colebrooke, Max Mueller and Paul Deussen tended to locate the central core of Hindu thought in the Vedas, the Upanishads and, above all, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Shankara. Despite the deeply anti-rational and idealistic (that is, anti-naturalistic) elements of Advaita Vedanta, key Hindu nationalist reformers – from Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – began to find in it all the elements of modernity. Vivekananda took the lead in propagating the view that the monism of Advaita Vedanta presaged the future culmination of all of modern science. Since modern science denied the role of any supernatural force outside nature, Vivekananda claimed that only Vedantic monism was truly scientific for it treated God as an aspect of nature and did not invoke any force external to nature…."

"The Hindutva literature is replete with glowing tributes to Hindu “renaissance”, which they claim to be similar to the European Renaissance that ushered in the modern age in the West. What they forget is that the Renaissance in the West re-discovered the humanistic and naturalistic sources of the Greek tradition that had been overshadowed by the Catholic Church – the Renaissance humanists rediscovered this-worldly philosophy of Aristotle and critical-realist Socrates over the other-worldly philosophy of Plato. The neo-Hindu “renaissance”, in contrast, re-discovered the most mystical and anti-humanistic elements of the Vedic inheritance – Advaita Vedanta – that had always overshadowed and silenced the naturalistic and scientific traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. Neo-Hinduism is no renaissance, but a revival. There is no denying that the neo-Hindu “discovery” of modern science in ancient teachings of Vedas and Upanishads had a limited usefulness. Since they had convinced themselves that their religion was the mother of all sciences, conservative Hindus did not feel threatened by scientific education. As long as science could be treated as “just another name” for Vedic truths, they were even enthusiastic to learn it….."

"The more prominence Hinduism gets abroad, even for wrong reasons like the new age and paganism, the more prestige it gains in India."

"It is this pagan connection that has brought people like Koenrard Elst, David Frawley and many others in close collaboration with Hindu nationalists."

"Indian government funded in part the work of ISKCON (Hare Krishna) in re-forestation of Vrindavan. Department of environment is supporting temples to maintain sacred groves. Ecological aspects of Sanatana dharma have been included in the school text books of at least one state, UP."

"I will argue that sacredness of nature does not protect nature. Just because people venerate trees and rivers does not meant that they will take care of them."

"Pride in the achievements of your own tribe is a legitimate emotion. But when pride is fuelled by prejudice against others, it becomes jingoism. Hindu triumphalism is jingoism, pure and simple. It is in fact a very dangerous jingoism targeted directly at Muslim and Christian minorities at home. The fundamental problem with Hindu triumphalism lies with its entirely self-serving and wilful denial that the great monotheistic religions of the world - Islam and Christianity - do have ample theological justifications for pluralism and tolerance."

"Far from being considered the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and reformers—including the great Swami Vivekananda—as fit only for sorcerers, fakirs and jogis…."

"Meera Nanda, originally a bio-technologist, crossed over to humanities... Since then, she has been writing articles and giving lectures denouncing Indian culture as inherently anti-scientific and accusing Indian nation builders of paving the way for pseudo-science and even of having a Nazi mindset. Another of Nanda’s article – ‘Calling India’s Freethinkers’, accuses Swami Vivekananda and Bankim Chandra (forefathers of the Indian national resurgence) of the ‘cardinal sin’ of trying to appropriate modern scientific thought for Hinduism. Even Nehru, who fostered scientific rationalism, gets lumped into this charge. She calls on the ‘progressive scientists’ of India to ‘carefully but firmly un-twine the wild and uncontrolled intertwining of science and spirituality that has been going on in Hinduism since the time of Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteeth century’. All attempts to investigate Hinduism in the light of science are declared to be linked to Hindutva, including work by the ‘apologists associated with the Ramakrishna Mission and Aurobindo Ashram’. She finds that any claim of Indian culture being scientific ‘constitutes the central dogma of Hindutva’. Links between Indian culture and science resonate with ‘deeply Hindu and Aryan supremacist overtones’. ... In what seems to be a blatant contradiction, she solicited and was awarded the John Templeton Foundation Fellowship in Religion and Science (2005-7), which coincidentally occurred under the leadership of a self-declared Evangelical Christian in 2006. Nanda has supported Protestantism as being scientific, while describing Hinduism as the exact opposite.... Nanda is representative of a pattern: The Templeton Foundation brings together science with Judeo-Christianity, and uses willing Indians like Nanda to attack Indian spiritual traditions."

"‘Meera Nanda doesn’t like India. And she hates popular Hinduism with even greater passion’."

"A recent case in point is Meera Nanda, who has been for some years on a self-appointed mission to expose all claims to knowledge by (let us lump them together, as she does) Hindu enthusiasts, nationalists, right-wingers or Hindutva activists. Her latest contribution, “Hindutva’s science envy”, blames in a vast sweep “the current crop of Hindu nationalists and their intellectual enablers” for being the progeny of thinkers like “Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, Annie Besant (and fellow Theosophists), Sarvepalli Radhakrishanan, M.S. Golwalkar and countless other gurus, philosophers and propagandists” — doubtless a most despicable crowd!"

"The claims Meera Nanda makes there about my own position are factually wrong and seem to be based on what Prof. Meenakshi Jain has aptly called "the Marxist bush telegraph". ... for now I will conclude with an observation on what seems to be her sincere declaration of interest. Among the points that "worry" her, she mentions this as the final one... Here, she really lays her cards on the table. It is very good that, unlike many other "secularists", she does not try to be clever and claim to speak for "true Hinduism" against a "distorted Hinduism" of the Hindu revivalists. Instead, she clearly targets Hinduism itself, deploring any development which might make Hinduism "gain prestige". Let us see if I can translate that correctly: wanting something or someone to suffer rather than to prosper is what we call "hate". She hates Hinduism, and her academic work is written in the service of that hate. To me, that is not the end of the matter. As a Catholic, I was taught never to give up hope, one of the great Christian virtues along with faith and charity.... Ms. Nanda has described how environmentalism in India is often clothed in Hindu language and symbolism. Thus, in trying to protect trees, women tie rakhis, the auspicious red threads which sisters tie around their brothers' wrists on the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan, around these trees."

"But her orthography betrays the American roots of her ideological orientation. In 2005-2007 she was in the employ of the John Templeton Foundation, an American Christian lobby-group that claims science as compatible with and even a product of Christianity.... It is not clear whether Meera Nanda has actually converted to Christianity or is merely one of those secularists who, after the fall and discrediting of Communism, have found new patronage in the US-centred Christian network. But fact is that she champions the Christian cause in India. ... That is why a Templeton Foundation agent on a mission to demonize Hindu resistance seizes on this opportunity to criminalize criticism of Islam by associating it with Breivik. [...] Here we have a Templeton scholar in the paid service of the Christian lobby, who tries to implicate the long-dead scholars Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, veterans of the Gandhian non-violent struggle, in the Breivik affair [...] With her false accusation, dragging me and especially dragging Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel into the Breivik affair, Meera Nanda has dishonoured herself. I will have a hard time seeing anything but a debtor in her. How did the Marxist intellectual Meera Nanda find employment with the Christian Templeton Foundation? Why, she led them to believe that she was a scientist and philosopher of science, sharing with her prospective employers a proven anti-Hindu animus. ...she doesn’t have the mind of a scientist. She has the mind of a believer, or at least of a politician who wants to keep the believers happy... Meera Nanda can only stand on the other side, criminalizing fundamental criticism of Islam, because she is not a scientist at heart... But we know who Meera Nanda is. She is a troubled woman projecting her own obsessions on others. She is animated by hatred of Hinduism and can’t keep a story straight. But she can make her Marxist and Christian employers believe that she serves their purposes well."

"Nanda writes disparagingly of “Hindu” intellectuals––including those in the West—who try to produce alternative sciences often inspired by post-modernism. She is unaware that many—including Einstein and Schrödinger—fit her descriptions of such “Hindu” Western prophets “facing backward” who revolutionized science by “alternative sciences”. She misreads those positions she criticizes into one anti-science conspiracy of post-modernism and Vedic science adherents. ... Instead of rewriting received Western wisdom to fit this real historical experience of India, she resorts to only Western conceptual categories. She damns both Indian social reality as well as attempts at fresh Indian conceptualization. For her, secularization means brainwashing the local population into an unashamed McCauleyite template illustrating deep feelings of insecurity about her own culture... Hers is a collage of ill-argued and tendentious positions; a generally unconvincing polemic. ... She is indeed a backward looking prophet, looking backward to the Western certainties of that age.... Our age begs an important question. How does Asia prepare itself for the Asian century which from all accounts would be on us within the next few decades and India, warts and all, among the leaders? At that global frontier, Asians would have once again to think for themselves drawing inputs from their many different subcultures. But Nanda seems to deny the possibility of such creative attempts."

"Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban [on the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie] has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement."

"There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra. ... There is no suggestion that the karsewaks started the violence ... there has been no real provocation at all ... And yet, the sub-text to all secular commentary is the same: the karsewaks had it coming to them. Basically, they condemn the crime; but blame the victims ..."

"Try and take the incident out of the secular construct that we, in India, have perfected and see how bizarre such an attitude sounds in other contexts. Did we say that New York had it coming when the Twin Towers were attacked last year? Then too, there was enormous resentment among fundamentalist Muslims about America's policies, but we didn't even consider whether this resentment was justified or not. Instead we took the line that all sensible people must take: any massacre is bad and deserves to be condemned. When Graham Staines and his children were burnt alive, did we say that Christian missionaries had made themselves unpopular by engaging in conversion and so, they had it coming? No, of course, we didn't."

"Why then are these poor karsewaks an exception? Why have we de- humanised them to the extent that we don't even see the incident as the human tragedy that it undoubtedly was ... I know the arguments well because—like most journalists—I have used them myself. And I still argue that they are often valid and necessary. But there comes a time when this kind of rigidly ‘secularist’ construct not only goes too far; it also becomes counter-productive. When everybody can see that a trainload of Hindus was massacred by a Muslim mob, you gain nothing by blaming the murders on the VHP 19 or arguing that the dead men and women had it coming to them. Not only does this insult the dead (What about the children? Did they also have it coming?), but it also insults the intelligence of the reader."

"There is one question we need to ask ourselves: have we become such prisoners of our own rhetoric that even a horrific massacre becomes nothing more than occasion for Sangh Parivar-bashing?"

"The answer, I suspect, is that we are programmed to see Hindu-Muslim relations in simplistic terms: Hindus provoke, Muslims suffer."

"When this formula does not work -- it is clear now that a well-armed Muslim mob murdered unarmed Hindus - we simply do not know how to cope. We shy away from the truth - that some Muslims committed an act that is indefensible - and resort to blaming the victims."

"Any media - indeed, any secular establishment - that fails to take into account the genuine concerns of people risks losing its own credibility."

"Even moderate Hindus, of the sort that loathe the VHP, are appalled by the stories that are now coming out of Gujarat: stories with uncomfortable reminders of 1947 with details about how the bogies were first locked from outside and then set on fire and how the women’s compartment suffered the most damage."

"There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra...Some versions have it that the karsevaks shouted anti-Muslim slogans; others that they taunted and harassed Muslim passengers. According to these versions, the Muslim passengers got off at Godhra and appealed to members of their community for help. Others say that the slogans were enough to enrage the local Muslims and that the attack was revenge...it does seem extraordinary that slogans shouted from a moving train, or at a railway platform, should have been enough to enrage local Muslims, enough for 2,000 of them to have quickly assembled at eight in the morning, having already managed to procure petrol bombs and acid bombs."

"The Japanese theatre art differs so widely from anything to be seen in Western countries that it might as well belong to the people of Mars or Saturn, so far removed is it from the ordinary affairs of life as known and experienced in the West. But just because the Eastern hemisphere has founded its theatres on opposite principles from those of Europe, there is all the more reason why this uncharted field of human endeavour should become familiar to our unaccustomed ears and eyes."

"The long procession of priests in picturesque robes, and the group of feudal lords in their large ceremonial court costumes of many colors, made a memorable stage picture, and one, indeed, that the most extravagant of motion picture scenes might well emulate."

"Kabuki is most distinguished when it deals with the weird and grotesque, and the American visitor may not be at all surprised if among the insubstantial stage creations of the Japanese he becomes acquainted with the spirit of a cherry tree, or the transformation of a maid into a fox or a lion."

"Throughout the realm, the Hina Matsuri will be observed in the homes of rich and poor alike when a series of shelves, one rising above the other, and covered with a red cloth will be placed in the best room of the dwelling. Here the treasured dolls and their furniture will be displayed for one day only."

"The western observer no doubt upon first impression may regard it as a hardchip that the girls of a family should do no more than gaze upon the beautiful dolls and be satisfied, and that these bright creatures of silk, embroidery and brocade from the hands of the skilled craftsmen are not to be touched, only to be admired at a distance. In brief, they are education, and so become removed from the sphere of ordinary playthings."

"In the No the world of the real is left behind and the audience enters into a land of imagination; the face of the actor would clash with the non-realistic material of the play and the treatment."

"A more disciplined stage than that of the Imperial can hardly be duplicated in any of the world's theater centers. The present repertory company has played together since the founding of the theater, and many of the younger actors have been associated with it since childhood."

"The oppression of women, economic or personal, is not solely a White-Black Race confrontation although the oppression of Black Women is deeply tied to the variable of race in the history of imperialism."

"The liberation of women is conceived as the desire of women to reduce men to housekeepers. Since most men despise manual work for feudal and middle class reasons, women’s liberation is feared as an effort by women to ‘feminise’ men, that is, degrade them."

"What we want in Africa is social transformation. It is not about warring with men, the reversal of role, or doing to men whatever women think that men have been doing for centuries, but it is trying to build a harmonious society."

"The transformation of African society is the responsibility of both men and women and it is also in their interest."

"We must remember that there were radical outlets for women in indigenous African cultures, and in our colonised societies, contact with Europe brought with it the inheritance of European movements and social concerns. So there were inheritors of the British suffragette movement in Nigeria, while my mother, a teacher's college professor, was a practitioner of many of the radical ideas of the Victorian period about women. My perceptions of gender hierarchies were sharp growing up. I was raised with a male sibling as well as female and male wards living with my mother. I was much of a tomboy then. I did not have any important position in my nuclear family of five children, meaning I was neither first nor last boy or girl. No position! I could also see that boys had advantages, even though my progressive mother made all the boys in her house, including my other brothers, do housework. They learned to sew, knit and embroider! She also made us share the housework with the house help or servants. She said her children could not grow up spoilt while others learnt to be effective and efficient. So from very young I had a healthy attitude towards class differences, having been raised to respect everybody in the work they did.Gender hierarchies were so sharp for me that I always wondered as a pre-teen whether marriage was a good idea. Many folktales and other forms of informal educational modes existed to help prepare women for accepting male dominance in marriage. I saw marriage in the Christian world I was in as restrictive, though my mother was a suffragette, if there was any such thing. I say "Christian" world because I could also see that women in the local, unWesternised society around us had different values and freedoms. Within Yoruba marriage, the woman was culturally expected to defer to the husband. Yet Christian marriage restricted Yoruba women of my mother's generation in an unusual way (dress, freedom of movement, association, and gainful work outside the home beyond the financial control of the husband). There were dignifying and structurally important roles for women in Yoruba culture, even within its patriarchal assumptions, and some would say, androgynous cultural practices and cosmology of the Yoruba, expressed in the philosophical fount to the culture that Ifa Divination Poetry with its thousands of verses. One argument is that women were weighted equally with men as human beings, but had to defer to men in certain contexts, while men deferred in others."

"My mother took her place very firmly as a leader in many structures, though in the"