"Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual."

"It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy; that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year and other times, in bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the choosing. If at any time it comes into my head that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a work-house."

"Wretched is he who has bound the land to himself [...]; a fool is he who is greedy when others possess. Life on earth passes away, it is not long; he is fortunate who has a good remembrance in it."

"Thus I the Womens Secrets have survey'd, And let them see how curiously they're made; And that, tho' they of different Sexes be, Yet in the Whole they are the same as we: For those that have the strictest Searchers been, Find Women are but Men turn'd Out-side-in: And Men, if they but cast their Eyes about, May find they're Women, with their In-side-out."

"The king pierced the lines of the miserable Khita. He was alone. He turned to look behind him, and, lo! around him were two thousand five hundred chariots of the vile Khita. Each chariot bore three men. The king had with him no chief, no marshal, no captain, no officer. Fled were his troops and his horses! Then lifted he up his voice to God, and said, "I call on thee, Father Ammon. I am amid unknown multitudes. Nations are gathered against me. My numerous soldiers have forsaken me. When I called to them not one listened to my voice. But I think Ammon worth more to me than a million of soldiers. I have never disobeyed thy word. Lo, have I not glorified thee, even to the ends of the earth?" Ammon heard when I called. He gave me his hand. He called to me, from behind: "Ramses, Miamon, I hasten to thy aid. It is I, thy Father. I am worth to thee more than a hundred thousand men." My prayer was answered. To the right I hurled my arrows. To the left I overthrew mine enemy. I was like Baar in his fury. The twenty-five hundred chariots encircling me were broken into splinters. Not a Khitan finds a hand to fight with. Their hearts faint within them, and fear palsies their limbs. I tumbled them into the waters like crocodiles. Head first I pitched them over, one after the other. I slew them by thousands! Then called the king to his archers, to his cavalry, to his chiefs who had failed to fight. He said, "Of what profit are such cowards? Is there one among you who has done his duty to his country? Had I not been given power from above, ye would all have perished. Every day I have made some of you princes. To sons, I have transmitted the honors of their fathers. If any evil has happened to Egypt I have not held you responsible. Whoever has come to me with his complaints, it is I who have administered justice, in person. Never did royal master for his soldiers what I have done for you. Yet you have played the coward, all of you. Not one of you stood by me when I had to fight. What a military deed is this to present at the Theban altar as an offering to Ammon! What a shame! What a disgrace, and to my soldiers, and to my cavalry! Yet the whole world has seen the path of my victory and my might. People saw it, and will repeat my name even in remote and unknown lands. Of the millions who saw me to-day, not one paused in his flight. All dropped their arrows and fled or turned to me in supplication.""

"Now I lay me down to take my sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."

"Our days begin with trouble here, Our life is but a span, And cruel death is always near, So frail a thing is man."

"His wife, with nine small children and one at the breast, following him to the stake."

"Xerxes did die, And so must I."

"Young Timothy Learnt sin to fly."

"Zaccheus he Did climb the tree Our Lord to see."

":Martyrdom of John Rogers: burned at Smithfield, 14 February 1554"

"My Book and heart Must never part."

"Zacheus he Did climb the tree His Lord to see."

"Young Obadias, David, Josias, — All were pious."

"Peter denies His Lord and cries."

"My book and heart Shall never part."

"Xerxes the great did die, And so must you and I."

"Peter denyed His Lord, and cryed."

"In Adam's fall We sinnèd all."

"... I plowed through relentlessly, beginning with the shortest articles and gradually working my way into the longer ones. The of irrelevant and incredible information that still burdens me had its origins in those pages, and I almost wore them out acquiring it."

"was the leading provider of encyclopedias in the , but after sales declined rapidly in the early 1990s the company was forced to file for bankruptcy. Many different organizational and market factors contributed to this crisis, such as the diffusion of the , the invention of , the technical challenges of moving text to electronic formats, and the difficulties of inventing a new format while also operating the leading seller of books."

"Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil's in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to escape. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain until sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe; but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one's curiosity. One turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon. Thence one drifts to the article on , which sends one to that on s in another volume ...."

"A midway solution between the tree and the rhizome was the one proposed by the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment. Trying to transform the tree into a map, the eighteenth-century encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and of d'Alembert, made in fact the rhizome thinkable. In respect to its hierarchical structure, the eighteenth-century encyclopedia was not necessarily different from a tree. What does make it distinct is, in the first place, the hypothetical nature of the tree: it does not reproduce a presumed structure of the world, but presents itself as the most economic solution with which to confront and resolve a particular problem of the reunification of knowledge. In the second place, the encyclopedist knows that the tree organizes, yet impoverishes, its content, and he hopes to determine as precisely as he can the intermediary paths between the various nodes of the tree so that little by little it is transformed into a geographical chart or a map."

"In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion."

"Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even thought I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am."

"I had a very simple, unremarkable and happy life. And I grew up in a very small town. And so my life was made up of, you know, in the morning going to the river to fetch water - no tap water, and no electricity - and, you know, bathing in the river, and then going to school, and playing soccer afterwards."

"Whenever I looked at rebels during raids, I got angrier, because they looked like the rebels who played cards in the ruins of the village where I had lost my family. So when the lieutenant gave orders, I shot as many as I could, but I didn't feel any better."

"I had my gun now, and as the corporal always said, "This gun is your source of power in these times. It will protect you and provide you all you need, if you know how to use it well.""

"My imagination at ten years old didn’t have the capacity to grasp what had taken away the happiness of the refugees.”"

"I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that."

"Sometimes we were asked to leave for war in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and continue the movie as if we had just returned from intermission. we were always either at the front lines, watching a war movie, or doing drugs. There was no time to be alone or to think."

"These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past."

"I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed up all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past"

"Things changed rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one had any control over anything. We had yet to learn these things and implement survival tactics, which was what it came down to."

"I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world"

"My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed"

"We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food"

"When I was very little, my father used to say, "If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.""

"At night it felt as if we were walking with the moon. It followed us under thick clouds and waited for us at the other end of dark forest paths. It would disappear with sunrise but return again, hovering on our path. Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. Under these stars I used to hear stories, but now it seemed as if it was the sky that was telling us a story as its stars fell, violently colliding with each other. The moon hid behind clouds to avoid seeing what was happening."

"That night for the first time in my life I realized that it is the physical presence of people and their spirits that gives a town life. With the absence of so many people, the town became scary., the night darker, and the silence unbearably agitating. Normally, the crickets and the birds sang in the evening before the sun went down. But this time they didn't, and the darkness set in very fast. The mood wasn't in the sky; the air was stiff, as if nature itself was afraid of what was happening."

"Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even thought I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am."

"If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die"

"ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end."

"My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time."

"Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images."