The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

— Montaigne

Adder, stay; stay, adder, that from the pattern of your coloring my sister my draw the fashion and the workmanship of a rich girdle that I may give to my love; so may your beauty and your pattern be forever preferred to all other serpents.

— from the Tupinambá, quoted in Montaigne’s Essays

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

— Rebecca West

An easy slope leads so directly from desire to satisfaction that the beauty of the person desired is enough to seem a tacit consent.

— Proust (via Sleepz and Thinkz)

Now there was a kind of truce, and everyone got back on board, so that when Nick cruised past he had a view of dangling legs, pinched dicks at funny angles, streaked hair and glistening skin, a floating tableau of men against the sky. Sex made them half conscious, half forgetful of the picture they made; they were sportsmen resting in stunned comaraderie, but some of them wriggled and held hands and breathed lustfully in each other’s faces. They kicked their feet in the water, indolent but purposeful. One of them who was standing behind leant forward, out of the sky and the trees, and Nick reached him a hand and shot up and hopped out streaming as two queens plumped apart to make room for him. He stood breathing and grinning in a loose but curious embrace with the men in the middle. He had a sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated — it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view.

— Montaigne

Our zeal does wonders when it is seconding our leaning towards hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. Against the grain, toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless as by a miracle some rare nature bears it, it will neither walk nor fly.

— Montaigne

. . . and we always fail to achieve an understanding that would allow us to rest.

— Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life

Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly alone.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

I hear some making excuses for not being able to express themselves, and pretending to have their heads full of many fine things, but to be unable to express them for lack of eloquence. That is all bluff. Do you know what I think those things are? They are shadows that come to them of some shapeless conceptions, which they cannot untangle and clear up within, nor consequently set forth without: they do not understand themselves yet. And just watch them stammer on the point of giving birth; you will conclude that they are not laboring for delivery, but for conception, and that they are only trying to lick into shape this unfinished matter. For my part I hold, and Socrates makes it a rule, that whoever has a vivid and clear idea in his mind will express it, if necessary in Bergamask dialect, or, if he is dumb, by signs:

Master the stuff, and words will freely follow.

[Horace]

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— Montaigne, from “Of the Education of Children”
(Tr. Frame)

It is from the margins that we can see the center more clearly; it is from the perspective of what Michel Foucault once characterized as the “perverse implantation” that we may better observe what we call normal. In the state of crisis induced by the pain of being alone, it is more likely that we will clearly see the motives and ends of the lonely self, even when that self moves from despair to happier ways of being.

— Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life

Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.

— Robbin Williams

………..                        ………………..Dare to be wise! Begin!
The man who would reform his life, but hesitates, is kin
Unto the rustic boar who waits until the stream is gone;
But ever rolling flows the stream, and ever will flow on.

— Horace

Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because the mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming of the most universal of melodies that only dies down when we go to sleep, a humming that turns into all-out singing when we are occupied by joy, or a mournful requiem when sorrow takes over.

— Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza

What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.

— Lydia Davis