 The Galaxy of Quotes
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I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom. What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness. To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power. True wit is nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought, but never so well expressed. Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise. Passions are the gales of life. Charm strikes the sight, but merit wins the soul. Two purposes in human nature rule. Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain. When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favor of the belief which he finds in himself. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man. Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience. Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. Three passions simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body. Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out. Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own. Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life. Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another. The reward of suffering is experience. Time as he grows old teaches all things. His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best. Wisdom comes alone through suffering. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
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