Object

God help anyone sick enough to develop an emotional relationship with an inanimate object.
-- Seaweed Shark

Transmutation

There is an old alchemical concept that whoever learns to perfect the metals, learns so much else that he loses interest in transmutation.
-- Seaweed Shark

Morality

The Distinction between morality and obedience is rarely well articulated.
-- Seaweed Shark

Human Being

"While the world was full of people, all too full, finding a genuine human being was not easy." -- Eiji Yoshikawa

Big Books

Books should not be too big. A big book is too often like one of those "pan for gold" attractions in the Rocky Mountains: a few bright chips amid much sand and water.
-- Seaweed Shark

Words

I like words. They are, after our bodies, pretty much our first playthings.
-- Seaweed Shark

Noblest Spirits

"Only the noblest spirits can bear with equanimity the success of their friends."
-- Will Durant, Caesar and Christ p.289

Power & Pettiness

"I cannot at the same time do homage to power and pettiness -- to the truth of consummate science, and the mannerism of undisciplined imagination."
-- John Ruskin, Modern Painters V1, Intro, sec. 4

Modern

"Looking to science for deliverance from the tragicomedy of history is part of what it means to be modern."
-- John Gray (The New Republic, April 20, 2012)

Something Special

"I further know that if God has something special for you, you have a knowledge of it inside you, which causes you not to be satisfied with anything that is not that thing."

-- Leonard Cheshire

Three Mysteries

CREATION, EVIL, TIME ~ three mysteries, about which it is only possible, in the last analysis, to say that they are somehow interconnected, and that their relationship to the greater mystery of divine Reality is one of limitation.
-- Aldus Huxley

The Principle of Democracy

The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other.
~ Will Durant

The Function of Poetry

"'What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?' is a question not the less poignant for being defiandy asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But 'nowadays'? Function and use remain the same; only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family."

Robert Graves

The Ugly Sea

"We are in rhythm with the old ocean: it rises irregularly twice in twenty-four hours, and then repents of rising; and so largely do we." -- R.A. Lafferty, "The Ugly Sea"

A Universal Corrosive

"I can think of lots of reasons why The Closing of the American Mind deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties; Bloom’s sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion. But this one carries a special urgency. As well as anyone then or now, he understood that the intellectual fashion of materialism​—​of explaining all life, human or animal, mental or otherwise, by means of physical processes alone​—​had led inescapably to a doctrinaire relativism that would prove to be a universal corrosive."

Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, Apr 9, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 29