'We cannot know if there would have been a Romanesque science. If there had been, no doubt it would have been to our own what Gregorian chant is to Wagner.' --Simone Weil

A pessimist: someone who mistakes the press of his ego for the weight of the world.
An optimist: someone who mistakes the lilt of the wind for his own power and freedom.

Cyril Connolly writes that a lemur has only so many postures and after it runs through them all, like a cheap kaleidoscope, it's back where it started. Apply this to human identity--and you will understand the place of creativity in human lives.

"Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has lived for three." --Carlyle, while translating Wilhelm Meister in 1823

"True! My filling came out inside my date's pussy" --SMU graffiti

"I knew then, on the arm of that giant figure, the ambition to conquer time, an ambition beside which the desire of the distant suns is only the lust of some petty, feathered chieftain to subjugate some other tribe." --Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor (1981)