#is

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#after #become #books #collection #depends

The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten. ↗

— James Buchan

#economic #events #forgotten #getting #getting older

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation. ↗

— James Buchan

#arabic #became #country #distrusted #european

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world. ↗

— James Buchan

#dominion #eternal #force #forms #god-given

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times. ↗

— James Buchan

#antiquity #commerce #cycle #famine #feast

We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned. ↗

— James Buchan

#crown #drama #earned #frets #his

I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. ↗

— Frances Farmer

#day #dirty #dish #during #even

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#common #delirium #love #love is #many

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world. ↗

— James Buchan

#come #commissioned #conqueror #dispassionate #english

Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need. ↗

— James Buchan

#competitive #conspicuous #consumption #creates #desires