"‘The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.’"

Je voyais tout en noir avant les élections, je vois tout en noir depuis.” [I saw everything black before the elections, I see everything black since.]

—Ernst Renan, quoted by Henry James in a letter to William James, 14 March 1876

"I am furious with a society that has educated me without ever teaching me to injure a man"

"I’m forever delighted, then delighted all over, at the things sentences can trip and trick you into saying, into seeing"

"Speculative thought is important, and unless you are doing speculative thought you are not doing any thought at all."