Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before. – Jacob A. Riis
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest–whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories–comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer. – Albert Camus
My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters. – David Knopfler
For what the horse does under compulsion, as Simon also observes, is done without understanding and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer. – Xenophon
Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But mans appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table. – Honore de Balzac
