Manly Quotes (page 123)
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron compositionby the incomparable wandering voice of Phdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my bodycaught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself--to ask...
Robert Lowell
A rebel can be a miserable and contemptible man; but there is nothing contemptible in a revolt as such - and to be a rebel in view of contemporary society does not in itself lower the value of a man. There are even cases in which one might have to honour a rebel, because he finds something in our society against which war ought to be waged - he wakens us from our slumber.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.
Thomas Mann
Happily men don’t realize how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller’s reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green...
W. Somerset Maugham
Because I liked you better. Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised. I'd throw the thought away. To put the world between us. We parted stiff and dry:'Farewell,' said you, 'forget me.''Fare well, I will,' said I. If e'er, where clover whitens. The dead man's knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you. Starts in the trefoiled grass, Halt by the headstone shading. The heart you have not stirred, And say the lad that loved you. Was one that kept his word.
A. E. Housman
Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.
B. F. Skinner