To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge. – Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951

I have learned the truth of the observation that the more one approaches great men the more one finds that they are men. – Bernard M. Baruch

[A] morning-land full of immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow… – Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography,