"From reading too much,
and sleeping too little,
his brain dried up on him
and he lost his judgment.
- Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
-0-
There’s more to life than books you know – but not much more.
—Morrissey
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Found these two at fivedials.com
“The powerful always seek to limit freedom by talking of the misuse of freedom, but freedom cannot be called freedom unless one has the right to misuse it... More than evil itself, I have learnt to fear the menace of good that comes in the form of improving others...” (Rabindranath Tagore from Jibansmriti, Rabindra Rachnabali)
I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark that I admit was highly paradoxical:-0-
“In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least, one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn’t play the game. The reply is a simple one: he refuses to lie…He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened…One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth…."
“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”
We are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety.
“But I refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which is still more feeble than their own, and which brandishes before an eager public albums of coloured photographs, instead of the now vanished masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with eliminating savage life, and unaware of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows of those that history has already destroyed”
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane (p.41)
"The genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs." - Francis Bacon.
"Proverbs embody the current and practical philosophy of an age or nation." - William Fleming.
"Proverbs teach the real people's speech, and open up the hitherto sealed book of the native mind" - John Beames.
