#classics

A man leaves his great house because he's bored With life at home, and suddenly returns, Finding himself no happier abroad. He rushes off to his villa driving like mad, You'ld think he's going to a house on fire, And yawns before he's put his foot inside, Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion, Or even rushes back to town again. So each man flies from himself (vain hope, because It clings to him the more closely against his will) And hates himself because he is sick in mind And does not know the cause of his disease. ↗

— Titus Lucretius Carus

#classics #latin #lucretius #philosophy #life

I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#love #age

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#prosody #beauty

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. ↗

— Leland Ryken

#classics #fiction #literature #novels #on-fiction

There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha ↗

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

#comedy #don-quixote #knighthood #world #death

And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre ↗

— George Orwell

#fiction-novel #philosophical #truth #change

Then said he, ’I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’.... So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. ↗

— John Bunyan

#classics #literature #courage

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward! ↗

— Homer

#cowardice #death #greece #war #death

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives. ↗

— Homer

#death #greece #death

Countless words count less than the silent balance between yin and yang ↗

— Lao Tzu

#classics #tao-te-ching #balance