Books & Reading

“The Book of the Courtier at Italian Wikisource”

“Read out<br />the travails of Gilgamesh, all that he went through!”

“I acknowledge that the sacrament of the altar is very God's body in form of bread, but it is in another manner God's body than it is in heaven.”

“The Yoga of action, leading to union with the soul is fiery aspiration, spiritual reading and devotion to Ishvara.”

“I just wanted to be the first one to fly for America, not because I'd end up in the pages of history books.”

“In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.”

“In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets. ... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.”

“If I had money, I would enjoy flying to Mars... This was the dream of the first cosmonauts. I wish I could realize it! I am ready to fly without coming back.”

“Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working.”

“We have good hopes that God will grant us to restore the authority over the remaining countries which the ancient Romans possessed to the limit of both oceans and lost by subsequent neglect.”

“If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.”

“When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion — because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.”

“[Their] things [works of Die Brücke-artists] must be exhibited. But I think it is incorrect to immortalize them in the document [Almanac] of our modern art (and, this is what our book ought to be) or as a more or less decisive, leading factor. At any rate I am against large reproductions [of Die Brücke paintings in The Blaue Reiter Almanac].”

“For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.”

“How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..”

“Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope. There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome.”

“The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.”

“Scholastic in form, Wyclif's writings are modern in spirit. His De Officio Regis is the absolute assertion of the Divine Right of the king to disendow the Church.”

“Kandinsky, Wassily – painter, printmaker and author – the first painter to base painting on purely pictorial means of expression and abandon objects in his pictures.”

“This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c. 1879-1882!!], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture.”

“The reason generally assigned for this absence of early records is that Diocletian burned all writings of the Egyptians bearing upon alchemy, because, as he said, these taught the art of making gold and silver; and, by destroying them, he took away... the power of enriching themselves and rebelling against the Romans.”

“Classical Sanskrit theatre flourished during the first nine centuries CE. Aphorisms on acting appear in the writings of Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian of the 5th century BCE, and references to actors, dancers, mummers, theatrical companies, and academies are found in Kautilya’s book on statesmanship, the Artha-shastra (4th century BCE).”

“English translation:<br>A lion took the dear life of Panini, author of the grammatical treatise.”

“how old was I when I got permanently fascinated with the early Antarctic explorers, Scott particularly, and all those ones, those early British ones who wrote about it, and some of the others too. They were such good writers, marvelous writers, Scott himself and Shackleton.”

“I have tried to draw realistically and not ideally.. .It may be a defect, for I have no mercy on warts, and I like adorning them with wanton hairs, rounding them off and giving them a bright surface.. . - A painter in embryo.. ..- Write me a line soon. I am feverish with anxiety.”