Greatly Quotes (page 185)
We stood silent. After a moment I said, "Real Geniuses never think they're geniuses."Who says?"Me."Because why?"Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven't you ever heard that? As soon as you think you're a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything.
Jeffrey Eugenides
I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.
Ayn Rand
Some six weeks ago
I was allowed by the doctor to have white bread to eat instead of the coarse
black or brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It is a great delicacy. It will
sound strange that dry bread could possibly be a delicacy to any one. To me
it is so much so that at the close of each meal I carefully eat whatever crumbs
may be left on my tin plate, or have fallen on the rough towel that one uses
as a cloth so as not to soil one’s table; and I do so not from hunger—I get
now quite...
Oscar Wilde
All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted would betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
Charles Sanders Peirce
At this gathering [Council of Niceau in 324 AD] many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon - the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus . . . until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.
Dan Brown