“The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand; that each act be ordered, that good and evil be decided arbitrarily, thus clearly.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If happiness, then, is activity expressing virtue, it is reasonable for it to express the supreme virtue, which will be the virtue of the best thing.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“My stardust melody, the memory of love’s refrain.”
—Mitchell Parish (1901–1993)
“There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)