A Dream of Cicero Marbles: What’s wrong, Swan? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Swan: I have! I had a crazy dream last night I met Cicero. Marbles: You’re kidding. You’ve been reading your books too much. Swan: As little as I can, in fact, with all my teaching. I don’t have time [...]
“All the recent Spanish governments have been contemptuous of culture, but the current one is downright aggressive towards it” - Arturo Pérez Reverte
In fact, the separation between the scientists and non-scientists is much less bridgeable among the young than it was even thirty years ago. Thirty years ago the cultures had long ceased to speak to each other: but at least they managed a kind of frozen smile across the gulf. Now the politeness has gone, and [...]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the doctor from Edinburgh, teaches new doctors about the mind.
Pushkin brings a desire for spiritual fulfillment between prisoners and their guard.
"As long as poets express merely their puny subjective impressions, they are not worth the name; but as soon as they know how to appropriate and express the world, they are poets. For then they are inexhaustible and can be constantly new, as opposed to a subjective nature, which quickly expresses its meagre inner life [...]
Every society is based on aristocracy, because this one, the true one, is demanding with regard to itself, and without this demand every society would die. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1954
The stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered – something really startling – a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious [...]
How language lends itself to the sciences.
Seeing how useful the vine was, the peasant supported it at a height with many props. Then, once he had harvested its grapes, he raised the stakes and let it fall, building a fire with the props. Leonardo da Vinci, Fables
