[History] doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Mark C. Elliott, quoted in "Laptop U", The New Yorker (May 20, 2013)

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios

At the end we dream of the beginning.

James Church, The Man with the Baltic Stare

Sooner or later, you learn things.  You don't realize until it's too late that you learned something; and then you don't remember where, or how, or why.  There's no voice that automatically pipes up: ... Attention! Learning Experience!

James Church, Bamboo and Blood

Mistakes are good.  The more mistakes, the better.  People who make mistakes get promoted.  They can be trusted.  Why?  They're not dangerous.  They can't be too serious.  People who don't make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability.  They might land on you.

James Church, A Corpse in the Koryo

We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good.
What authority surfeits on would relieve us: if they
would yield us but the superfluity, while it were
wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely;
but they think we are too dear: the leanness that
afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an
inventory to particularise their abundance; our
sufferance is a gain to them Let us revenge this with
our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (Act 1, Scene 1) 

The longer I live the more convinced I am that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

Shiva Naipaul, quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Feb 2002 Atlantic magazine.

Truth is one.  The wise speak of it in many ways.

Rig Veda

Montailou culture was directed towards mere reproduction, self-preservation and the perpetuation of the domus in the world below.  The only element of "growth" which happened to manifest itself early in the 14th century had little to do with economics.  It was concerned with the after-life and with a kind of spiritual transcendence, locally centered on the Albigensian idea of Heaven.  … Montaillou is the physical warmth of the ostal, together with the ever-recurring promise of a peasant heaven.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The promised Land of Error

When done for reasons other than competition, physical exercise ... can be a simultaneous act of peaceful prayer (talking to God) and deep meditation (listening to God), allowing me the space to ask without using words while listening to answers that I know already exist: an inner guidance of divinity achieved through outer exertion.

Romano Scaturro, 50@50

I'm a treetop flyer,
Born Survivor.

Stephen Stills, Treetop Flyer

Fate freely accepted ... is this not the very definition of Grace?

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - in Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error - talking of the life of a 14th Century sheep herder of Occitania.

Having noted Chinese immobility, they gained a clearer sense of their own motion.  Their appreciation of individual initiative was enhanced as they noted that individuals in China could undertake only what society expected of them.  They grasped more sharply the strength of the human personality in the West by observing that the only recognized human entity in China was the collective.  They took the measure of the role of competition in their own country when they saw that no one in China could escape his assigned place, for to do so would offend against the established hierarchy.  They saw more clearly how important merchants were in Britain by observing how deeply they were scorned in China.  They became aware of their own devotion to the new by discovering the cult of the immutable.  In short, they gained a clearer insight into the fact that individualism, competition, and innovation were the wellsprings of their own wealth and power.

Alain Peyrefitte's observation, on the "failed" Macartney expedition to China 1792-94, in his masterful The Collision of Two Civilisations. 

The world is full of ways and means to waste time.


Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance

Te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora,
Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.

(May I be looking at you when my last hour has come,
And dying may I hold you with my weakening hand.)

Tibullus

She hated the urgency with which some people read newspapers, their belief that the mere knowledge of certain events - belated, incomplete, and often false knowledge - made them active participants in society.

Lara Vapnyar, "Fischer vs Spassky," in The New Yorker of October 8, 2012

Despite knowing what it takes to be content, a man might still be unhappy.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

To God belongs the East and the West.  May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

Sometimes it is not wise to persist in explaining oneself.

Amitay Ghosh, River of Smoke.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements--surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7