“Niebuhr was right,” said Goethe, “when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?”

—ECKERMANN, 1831.

Great things may be accomplished in our days; great discoveries, for example, great enterprises; but these do not give greatness to our epoch. Greatness makes itself appear notably by its point of departure, by its flexibility, by its thought.

—SAINTE-BEUVE.

Le monde est inepte à se guarir. Il est si impatient de ce que le presse qu’il ne vise qu’ à s’en desfaire sans regarder à quel prix|... le bien ne succede pas necessairement au mal; un autre mal luy peult succeder, et pire.

—MONTAIGNE.

Peggio assai che l’averla perduta

Egli è il dir; la mia gente è caduta

In obbrobrio alle genti ed a me.

—BERCHET.

Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—GEORGE SANTAYANA.

Man, biologically considered,... is the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and indeed the only one that preys systematically on his own species.

—WILLIAM JAMES.

A work of art should express only that which elevates the ‘soul and pleases it in a noble manner. The feeling of the artist should not overstep these limits; it is wrong to venture beyond.

—BETTINA BRENTANO.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Si sine uxore pati possemus, Quirites, omnes ea molestia careremus; set quoniam ita natura tradidit ut nec cum illis satis commode nec sine illis ullo modo vivi possit, saluti perpetuae potius quam brevi voluptati consulendum est.

—SPEECH OF THE CENSOR METELLUS NUMIDICUS, 102, B.C.

I thought love had been a joyous thing, quoth my uncle Toby. ‘Tis the most serious thing, an please your honour, that is in the world, said the corporal.

—LAURENCE STERNE.

“But what do I know of Aurelia, or any other girl?” he says to me with that abstracted air; “I, whose Amelias were of another century and another zone.”

—GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

—FRANCIS BACON.

In the course of things, those which follow are always aptly fitted to those which have gone before; for this series is not like a mere enumeration of disjointed things, which has only a necessary sequence, but it is a rational connexion: and all existing things are arranged together harmoniously, so the things which come into existence exhibit no mere succession, but a certain wonderful relationship.

—MARCUS AURELIUS.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

—HENRY ADAMS

Omnia exibant in mysterium.

—THOMAS OF AQUIN.

Illi sunt veri fideles Tui qui totam vitam suam ad emendationem disponunt.

—IMITATIO CHRISTI.