“..et tamen nihil est sciens vel quiescens, nisi actualiter sit sciens vel quiescens.”
Source: Philosophical writings
“Сколько гривенников, столько миросозерцаний”
Source: Воспоминания о будущем. Избранное из неизданного
“..and there's growing up a scientific church, wherein knowledge, and not humility, labour, and not penance and fasting, are considered essentials”
Source: The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries; a Comprehensive Account of Upwards of one Hundred An
“He was fucking sad. That's it. That's the point. He knows life is never going to get any different for him. That there's no fixing him. It's always going to be the same monotonous depressing bullshit. Boring, sad, boring, sad. He just wants it to be over.”
Source: My Heart and Other Black Holes
“I wanted to win. No, that's not right.
I simply didn't want to lose.”
Source: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
“Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.”
Source: Seven Types of Ambiguity
“From the geyser ventilators
autumn winds are blowing down
on a thousand business women
having baths in Camden Town.
Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
steam's escaping here and there,
morning trains through Camden cutting
shake the Crescent and the Square.
Early nip of changeful autumn,
dahlias glimpsed through garden doves,
at the back precarious bathrooms
jutting out from upper floors;
and behind their frail partitions
business women lie and soak,
seeing through the draughty skylight
flying clouds and railway smoke.
Rest you there, poor unbeloved ones,
lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
trolley-bus and windy street!”
Source: Few Late Chrysanthemums
“And he is an owl
He is an owl, "Man" tattooed in his armpit
Under the broken wing
(Stunned by the wall of glare, he fell here)
Under the broken wing of huge shadow that twitches across the floor.
He is a man in hopeless feathers.”
Source: Wodwo
“I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles Voltaire.
Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men." He could have made a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or The Antipoet, the king of boobies, the prince of the shallow, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers, the father who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century.”
Source: Baudelaire, His Prose and Poetry
“[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.”